The Wraeththu Chronicles (3 page)

"You must forgive me for being insensitive," he told me. "I've been alone for months now. It's easy to forget how to share things."

I was going through a phase of being uneasy with him, which came about every two hours, and struggled for something to say. Eventually, "Where have you come from?" burbled out. He ran his hand down the pony's sleek orange neck, his face troubled.

"About ten miles north of your place, I came to another farm. It was huge, expensive. You know—palm trees, verandas, drinks on the terrace, that sort of thing. They were into horses in a big way: and I was in a bad way. God knows what they thought when I lurched into their polite little tea-party! My arm was cut to the bone and stank like a carcase. I was sweating, swearing, hallucinating!" He laughed and so did I, but I did not think it was funny. "God, I was nearly dead," he continued. "Two days before that I had been traveling on the road with a friend. We stopped while I went into the bushes. We had a car, you know, and a whole tank of petrol. Anyway, I was only gone for a minute or two, but when I went back, the car was on fire and my friend was lying beside it—what was left of him. Raw meat! God! Two men, a woman and a child were watching. They didn't smile, not anything. But their hands were red with his blood . . ." I did not like him talking like this. My heart was beating fast and I wanted him to stop. I did not want to hear any more. It made me nervous and sick. He spoke of the life I had now chosen. I was so fickle; one moment I begrudged his silence, the next I loathed his confiding in me. He did not see me though, did not see my discomfort, just kept stroking and stroking the pony's neck and carried on exorcising his bitter ghosts.

"I ran and I ran and I ran," he said, his voice getting fainter, "and I fell, got up, ran and fell again. That's how I hurt my arm. I can't remember doing it..." He straightened up and smiled. "Anyway, I was lucky, the fine people at that very white, clean, prosperous farm weren't prejudiced. They knew I was Wraeththu, but they were only curious. Wonderful liberals. Fools. They cleaned me, fed me, healed me and then, can you believe it, even offered me a job! Decorative as the palm trees, that's me. It would have been easy to stay, forget who and what I was for a time, but I had to keep going. I couldn't stay. So I repaid their hospitality and kindness by stealing this very expensive pony—and money. Look." He burrowed in his shirt and held out a crumpled bundle of paper. Silver stripes in it caught the sun.

"You said you had no money!" I gasped in one of my common moments of pathetic innocence.

"I know," he said wryly, smiling, and put it away again. "We'll need money later, really need it. I wasn't going to waste it."

After that, the atmosphere between us improved greatly. He had not crossed the gulf, but at least he had thrown me a rope.

For many days we traveled towards the mountains, conserving our supplies as best we could and resting only when absolutely necessary. We were lucky to find water on several occasions and the pony was content to pick at the sparse vegetation along the way. On the evening of the seventh day, we clambered through the foothills of the crags. Plants were becoming fewer, so we gathered as much as we could carry to feed the pony later on. Cliffs reared black and gaunt in impressive silence toward the darkening sky. Splintered rocks littered the ground, and strangely, brackish, milky pools of water lay in the hollows of them. Cal warned me not to touch it. As there was neither brush nor wood to gather, we could not light a fire when we camped for the night. We huddled uncomfortably under a blanket, too tired to keep going, too discomforted to sleep. For the first time since that first night, Cal deigned to touch me. We sat with our backs pressed into an overhanging rock with the blankets swathed around us. Awkwardly, Cal had put his arm around me, more because he was feeling miserable than because he wanted to hold me, I think. I realized that now I was absurdly disappointed that he had initiated nothing physical between us. It is difficult to work out why I had changed my mind about that. I thought that Wraeththu were on the way to not being exactly human, and it was part of their glamor, I suppose, that forbidden and secret sensuality they shrouded in ritual and reverence. Cal had spoken only briefly of such things and then only dropping meager hints; to test my reaction, I think. He once said, as we lay in a sandy hollow at night, that I possessed a rare and stunning beauty. His words had come to me out of the darkness, I could barely see him, and I had laughed, too loud, immediately, in sheer embarassment

"Don't be ridiculous!" I had cried, more aggressively than I had intended, because I felt nervous, and just a little scared. He had smiled in a horrible, sneery way.

"Pell, that's one thing about you that is unattractive," he said. "You must know you are beautiful. It is more conceited to deny it. If you think that kind of modesty is becoming, you're wrong. It's just pathetically human. When someone tells you you're beautiful, you don't have to say anything at all."

I squirmed in humiliation for hours afterwards, and would not speak to him, but I knew he was right. Mima and I had always thought ourselves superior to all our peers, and not just in looks. But I had always thought

it ill-mannered to let people know that. Cal was of a different world. His kind are proud of themselves and because none of them are truly ugly, Wraeththu are never ashamed to admit they are beautiful. Only in a world where ugliness prevails is it a shame to be vain, a cruelty to appreciate loveliness in oneself. Just being around Cal kindled my sexuality. I must admit this worried me. Had I possessed, unknown within myself, the inclination to desire another male? Perhaps I was being subtly brainwashed, and yet... sometimes, when I looked at Cal, out of the corner of my eye, in the evening, in the red light, it seemed a woman stood there; a woman who might have green hair or wings; something strange, unearthly. Sometimes I was frightened, sometimes just confused. Was my mind losing its grip on reality? The heat of the desert. .. ? I was in awe of Cal's magic; that which I could sense beneath the surface and his precise yet languid movements; his cat-like pride in himself, called to me, softly but insistent, like an enchantment. His eyes mirrored an intimacy long-gone, but it was caught within him for ever. That night, crouched under the gaunt, black cliffs, I longed to touch his face, to make him look at me, instead of the middle distance where old memories replayed themselves on the night, but I could not bring myself to move. My previous life had been cut off and had floated away from me, Mima's face was fading and her hands were mere wisps that reached for me, but I was still young, inexperienced and frightened. The beast slept within me but I was not ready to wake it.

The next day, we made our way up into the mountains. Starting at dawn, we followed a winding, stony path between the rocks, always traveling upwards. Cal told me he thought that once water had flowed down the mountains and had cut this convenient little road for us. In that time, the desert would have been lush and fertile. People would have lived there. I wondered how long it had been since others had climbed this path. It might have been centuries. The mountains had been attacked by huge pressures. We passed through a canyon, so deep it seemed we walked underwater and, looking up, we could see stars. The sides of it looked as if they had been hacked by a giant axe. Huge, scrawny birds, wheeled high above us in the light, their ragged voices reaching us as mournful cries.

"They are lost souls who cannot give up this world," said Cal. "They will not pass to the other side."

I shivered, even though I felt he was joking. "Will we have to leave Red behind?" I asked. By this time, our pony had a name.

"Oh no, it's not very far now," Cal replied vaguely. "Look at this." He had found a fossil in the canyon wall.

A thought struck me. "Have you been this way before?" "Yes. Once."

My theory of us venturing into territory untouched by man for centuries abruptly evaporated. "Are we near Immanion, then?"

"Oh no, nowhere near." He was now sorting through some interesting stones that glittered pink and blue along the path. "Look at this. It could be anything." He held a rough crystal up to me. I was riding the pony more expertly now and it stopped when I wanted it to.

"Cal!" I said with a slight whine in my voice. "Where are we going?" My trousers had ripped at the knees because I had fallen over earlier in the day. While I waited for an answer he thoughtfully licked his forefinger and rubbed the graze on my knee.

"Hopefully, by tonight, we will reach the end of this pass. We will come to what looks like a vast moon crater mostly filled with a rather unpleasant soda lake. On the shores of that lake is a rough little Wraeththu town called Saltrock. It's been there about eighteen months, and yes, I have been there before. I have friends there. Good friends who have pioneered their way to this hellish spot to build a safe haven. At the moment it's not much, but it will be . . ." He was annoyed with me. I can see why now, but at the time I went sulky. "Is that all you want to know?"

I shrugged in the most irritating way I could. Was that all I wanted to know? I wanted to know everything and he told me as little as he had to. I was a willing convert to the way of Wraeththu, yet I knew so little about them. Cal's alien strangeness had become familiar because I was used to him, not because I understood him.

By twilight, the cliffs suddenly fell away beneath us and we stood at the lip of what once must have been a waterfall. Two figures, almost completely covered in sand-colored cloth, appeared in our path. They were armed with long knives. I felt as if my heart had leapt into my throat and I jerked Red's head savagely. But Cal spoke softly to them and they melted away again. For once I held my tongue. A path had been hewn out of the rock to the valley floor. It was narrow and difficult to follow. A strange, acrid stench reached my nostrils as we descended. Only when we reached the bottom did I dare look up. Ahead of us a vast sheet of what looked like molten gold reflected the sinking sun. Steams and vapours coiled and leapt off the surface. Everywhere, grotesque mineral deposits stood like sculptures, the models for which I would not care to meet. The lake was ringed by mountains and not too far away I could see fresh water cascading down the black rock. Saltrock town, a ragged silhouette in the twilight, was lit by flickering yellow and orange fingers of flame.

Someone came to meet us, A thin, rangy horse galloped toward us along the lake's stony shore. Cal stopped dead. He was smiling.

"Behold exotica, Pell!" he exclaimed, with a grin from ear to ear. He who rode the thin horse skidded it to a halt in front of us. Pebbles flew everywhere. When he leapt from the animal's back, it was in a wild tangle of flying rags, tassels and flying red, yellow and black hair. (Another reality shift shocked me cold as the sexes mingled. Was this creature male or female, or could it be both. . .?!)

"Cal! They signaled it was you!" he cried and, with restrained enthusiasm, they embraced.

In the twilight I could just see his amazing, purposefully tattered clothing and incredible hair. If Cal had ever seemed alien to me, there are no words to describe my first impressions of the second Wraeththu I had ever met. A twinge of despair wriggled through me as I waited, small and silent, while they greeted each other. Fumes rose off the lake like ghosts and the smell was making me feel sick. Cal suddenly remembered me. Partly disentangling himself, he said, with a wave of his arm, "Seel, this is Pell. I abducted him from a peasant farm." (Laughter). Nettled, and feeling this was wildly exaggerated, I moved my head in acknowledgment. Seel assessed me in an instant, fixing a huge, disarming grin across his face. "Welcome to Saltrock," he said in a way that let me know I was irrelevant. We strolled toward the town. Seel linked his arm through Cal's and chattered continuously about things and people I did not know. The horses plodded behind. Seel overwhelmed me. He burned with an undeniable dynamism, eclipsing even Cal's charisma, although he was not as tall. When he noticed I was trailing behind, he decided to make a good impression on Cal. I was swooped upon and wrapped in leather-strapped, metal-studded arms. "You look so tired. It's not far. Lean on me."

It pains me to remember what a bad-tempered wretch I was then. The only thing that kept me from shrugging Seel off with a curse, was that I lacked the guts.

Saltrock was my first true encounter with the Wraeththu way of life. I cannot deny it astounded me. I cannot remember what I was expecting, but Saltrock was a real town, or the beginnings of one. Admittedly the buildings were constructed of a mad variety of materials, with seemingly little organization. Some were quite large and made of solid wood, others little more than thrown-together metal sheeting or mere tents of animal hides. Light was provided by flaming torches that gave off an oily reek, hurricane lamps and thick candles. The inhabitants, creatures as startling as Seel, exuded spirit and energy. Many recognized Cal as we passed among them. Everywhere the drabness and disarray was disguised by gaudy decoration.

Wraeththu boys of bizarre appearance with painted faces strutted through the crazy streets; some were still working into the night. There was a sound of hammering. All carried guns or knives. I once caught a glimpse of a rusting, flashy car sagging in a sheltered corner and a corral with a high fence teeming with restless horses. Nobody looked at me and the atmosphere, though strange, did not feel hostile.

Seel's house was a little way out of the center of Saltrock, set apart from the other buildings. It was an incredible sight; a large wooden, gothic anachronism. Only skilled carpenters could have produced such a thing. The doors were not locked. Seel said to me, as yet unaware of the simplicity of my origins, "Sorry, we have no electricity here yet." Someone, with a crazy, spiked mop of black hair, had taken our horses from us. I had seen the whites of his eyes, like a mad beast, gleaming and the grin he had fleered at me was nothing other than feral.