North Wind (8 page)

There was hardly any water. Twice, when the canteen was empty, he had to leave Bella and search alone, getting frantic about her safety, before he found a stream.

Sid began to feel as if he was going mad. She had not spoken to him aloud since they left the cistern cave. She was not going to speak aloud until this ordeal was over, you could see it in her eyes. He couldn’t cope. He had lost his grip.

The uncertainty was terrible. He was speaking to her in the Common Tongue and he didn’t know what he was saying. She was telling him things with her silence, but what? He could not know for sure until she spoke.

For Aleutians it was normal to let things flow. Everybody worked from their own version of the multiple script. They never knew exactly how far all the scripts agreed, until somebody “made a speech” and collapsed the wave. And then no one could prove what had
really
been going down before…. No such concept. If you were an Aleutian you could express what you liked in the Common Tongue. It wasn’t evidence. No one could hold you to anything, unless you were a Signifier and they could get you to put it into Spoken Words. What a way to live. It was unendurable.

Sid babbled to fill the silence.

“You’d better familiarize yourself with human customs. We’ll start with cricket. You have eleven men on each side. The side that’s in to bat takes turns to hit a ball, the side that’s in to field stands around trying to catch the ball. Somebody throws the ball towards the batsman. Not
at
the batsman: a crucial distinction. Placing your fielders is an underrated science. You have long leg, short leg, mid off, mid on, deep cover…. Right beside the batsman we have silly mid on, so called because it is a very silly place to stand. Come on, sweetheart, one more step. Let’s see if we can reach that rock. No, not this rock. The big one over there. I bet you can.”

He told her not to worry, the Aleutians would be back. The purebreds were fools; they’d forgotten all they’d ever known. When Braemar Wilson tried to blow up the bluesun she wasn’t joking. She had seen the future. You wouldn’t get
Braemar
imagining you could throw the Aleutians out, and have them stay out. Kill them and have them stay dead. Sometimes he sang to himself, holding her up against his shoulder as they stumbled.

the North wind will blow
and we shall have snow
and what will poor robin do then, poor thing?

“You don’t understand, do you?” he demanded. “You’ve never met a weather system like ours. Your techs can’t imagine it: they don’t
imagine
things. The north wind will blow, down out of the freezing desert, and sure, it will cool India. But what else will it do? You have tame weather. Ours is
wild.
Wild as a bluesun.”

He told her she mustn’t think he was a protestor. He was absolutely not involved in this vile stupid business. He was her faithful and true servant. “But we have to get on, Bel. One more step. And another. Good girl, clever girl. One more.”

On the fourth night from the hotel they came to a ruined Christian chapel, on a ridge that they were following above the road. Sid hoped that it was still the right road. They had walked, if you could call it that, from dawn until noon and again from late afternoon until twilight.

“Look at this,” crowed Sid. “Five star accommodation for madam!” The chapel was a roofless shed, thickly carpeted in ancient animal droppings. “Plus, I can get you a discount for the shit. It’s not very fresh, what an oversight.”

They’d had to give up the idea of her wearing the cloak. He unslung it from his shoulders and tucked it over her, and poured some water into the canteen cup.

“You’re to drink that. You hear? No nonsense.”

They didn’t drink like humans; they took most of their liquid in their soupy food. She had merely stared at him reproachfully when he tried to make her eat biscuits. He’d had to mush them up in water in the cap of the canteen. Now there were no biscuits left, she’d decided to refuse to drink. It was true the stuff tasted strange. He was afraid the canteen wasn’t working anymore and they were drinking raw stream water, contaminated with God knows what. But that wasn’t the problem. He suspected she was trying to save their water for Sid: which he wouldn’t allow.

He scowled awfully. “DRINK IT. I can find more.”

She inserted a drop or so between two rows of narrow, close-set white teeth; returned the undiminished cup to his hand, with finality.

It was cold that night. He sat with the alien cradled in his arms, staring at the broken cross above the stained white gable. He didn’t know what day it was. Or night. He’d got used to living with the aliens, who didn’t seem consciously to measure anything. He heard howling close by, and a rapid scuffling of animal feet: a pack of wild dogs.

Sid was a city creature, along with most of the population of the human world. He’d never been out of sight of people and packed dwellings until he came to Mykini. He’d seen footage about fruits and berries: edible tubers? What had happened to all of that? Somebody had emptied Mother Nature’s larder, or it was the wrong time of the year, he wouldn’t know. Where there are predators there must be prey. He could’ve hunted whatever the wild dogs hunted. If he knew how to start.

His left arm was around her. His right hand gripped the clumsy souvenir firearm. He had to have some illusion that he could protect the kid. But they had seen nothing of the armies since their jeep was requisitioned. Bella was going to die of hunger and exhaustion, not by violence. It was so cold they couldn’t stay still. They walked on by moonlight. At dawn, the fifth dawn, they reached a highway. The sky was dyed violet and rose between hill masses ahead. A road-bridge lay sprawled across the bed of a shallow river. In midstream, where it had been swept away completely, a causeway of shored-up stones crossed the gap. Sid left Bella under a pillar of the bridge at the western bank, and went to fill their canteen. He dipped his head in the stream, it was icy cold.

He remembered, back at the Trading Post, she had said she wanted to collect incunabula. So he had gone down to the cablepoint and found out the meaning of the English word. They were free with their English translations. He’d had to decide what the hell a “European printed text from before 1501” must mean in an Aleutian context. He had scoured the abandoned houses. The failed resettlement had been looted thoroughly and often—funny how there are always looters, no matter how depopulated a place gets. But he found a
printed book,
printed in English, and brought it back in triumph. She was very touched. She put it reverently aside: Sid was disappointed.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“Wait a minute. You’re a librarian, and you can’t read?”

“I can memorize the shapes of the letters. I know what they’re supposed to do. But nothing happens in my mind.”

She couldn’t see why this was funny. It was her obligation. Not being able to read, was part of the roughly speaking “genetic make-up” of the person known as Maitri’s librarian—along with his disability, his skill with the alien mixing desk, his courage in adversity and thin-skinned cringing over trifles. Along with the subtle traits, whatever they were, that made Sid call his companion feminine. But to herself, she was not a human girl. She was a…a polyp, torn from the multiple life of Aleutia. How could she survive?

She was asleep or unconscious when he came up from the water. He knelt beside the meager body. Her ears, half hidden by the black slick locks of “hair,” were the same convoluted cups of gristle, set horizontally instead of vertically. Some aliens could move them like animal ears but Bella wasn’t good at that. She could only manage a little twitching, like a human’s party trick. He felt fiercely protective, possessive. He had done everything for her. He’d shown her how to take down her pants to pee. But he could not keep her alive. The swan princess does not translate into the human world. His memory was stacked with images from a childhood spent in front of the screen.
Find yourself,
they’d ordered him. Now he found Bella. She was the immortal girl, seduced into leaving Shangri La, in
Lost Horizon.

She slept: a tiny old woman, so ancient that every scrap of humanity had been wrung out of her. She had left her immortality behind, and the brutal weight of human time had fallen on her.
“Most old,”
he murmured,
“Most old, of anyone I have ever seen.”

Bella would die. And the north wind would blow.

Her eyes were open. He started: but she wasn’t looking at him. She was watching the flowing river. Her eyes brimmed with the alien tears that filled their eyes but never fell. She turned her head.

Sid.
Informally, she didn’t use the meaningless noise. It was a kind of
hey you,
but personalized; she called him by his self. It hurt. He had barely eaten for days. He was in a weak, emotional state: he couldn’t stand any more of this.

“You’re coming with me to Athens.”

she repeated, with a faint smile.

Sid didn’t want to discuss that. “We need food. I’m going foraging. You stay here.”

“Stop that nonsense! I’ll be back soon.”

He stood. At once he dropped again. There was a crowd of people coming up the old highway. They came on like a broad murky tide. He could see their scouts moving in the trees on either side.

she demanded feebly,

“No. It’s travelers.”

Humanity on the way from nowhere to who knows where, refugees without a destination. They were human locusts. Travelers recognized two categories:
one of us
and consumable. Sid stared around wildly, but it was far too late to get out of their way.

“Lie still!”

He flung the chador over her head. “I don’t know! Lie still!”

They were spotted, of course. They were taken to the line of motley vehicles, around which foot-passengers and animals herded and ambled; to a chicken-shit motorized camper van that clearly belonged to someone important. A thin, respectable looking old man was brought out. He looked the fugitives over. A small crowd gathered, while in the background the river-crossing went on. Vans and carts rumbled onto the causeway, amid shouted instructions. Around them dogs sniffed and barefoot children milled. A bony pair of grey horses searched for blades of grass in the old highway paving.

“Speak English?” suggested the old man.

Sid took a gamble. “I
am
English. Sir.”

Laying claim to native ownership of the world’s best surviving contact language was risky. But it often impressed the old folks. It was nostalgic.

The patriarch clasped his hands. “Ah!
English!”

Sid bowed modestly. His glance flickered over the crowd. The women were heavily veiled. He saw glimpses of bright skirts flashing above bare, scabbed ankles. The young men were hefting exotic weaponry. Some of them wore fresh fragments of Allied or Reformers uniform. But they didn’t look seriously military. The atmosphere felt reasonably peaceful.

“And your friend?”

“My wife. Naturally, English too.”

The patriarch and his people considered Bella. They sensed something, some threat. Before he saw it coming, two young men had gripped Sid by the arms. Another two grabbed Bella.

Sid yelled. “Leave my woman alone! Don’t disgrace me!”

His appeal to their customs was in vain. A third man pulled off the chador, while the first two kept close hold of the dangerous unknown creature beneath.
Please,
begged Sid, silently, not knowing what he was pleading for.

For her to be Clavel and convince the travelers she was as human as they. For her to grow wings and fly…. The crowd recoiled. Wah, Bleggh. Euck. Someone yelled, in disgust and pity. Sid didn’t have to recognize the Eurasian dialect to understand.

“She’s a halfcaste!”

The old man was silent forever. “What are you doing here?” he asked at last. “Don’t you know, the aliens are gone and the armies are hunting down anyone who’s had dealings with them?”

“We were heading south, for the Enclaves, to get away from the war. We didn’t know. We were on the road when it started happening—”

The oldster shook his head. His compassion was weary and genuine. “I don’t know where you can go now.” He looked at Bella. “Poor child. What horrible things you do to yourselves. You may travel with us, if you wish. But keep
her
covered.”

Sid could have fallen to his knees, sobbing in gratitude. He wanted to kiss the man’s feet. The patriarch, with a kindly wave of his hand, ended the audience. The traveler women closed in: hands darting, eyes flashing, tongues jabbering.