The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (17 page)

During the daylight hours, he roamed his surroundings, climbing the rocks, following the trail of the stream. He gave names to trees, plants and animals that were his alone. He redefined his landscape. Yet somewhere, always, in the back of his mind, Saltrock went on, and Cal went on, and the ruined settlement to the north went on. An empty promise hung on a spiky mesquite tree, flapping in the wind like an old torn scarf, and though it might become more ragged every day, it still clung to the twigs and wound itself around the trunk. It was bloodstained and burned, and it belonged to a dream, and Flick could see it sometimes, on the edge of his vision.

One evening, after the meal had been cleared away, Itzama did not settle himself for more stories, but beckoned for Flick to follow him. ‘You want to see something?’

They went into the inner cave and here crawled on hands and knees through a cramped tunnel. Flick had looked down it before, but hadn’t believed it led anywhere. The weight of the rock pressed down upon him and it was not a comfortable feeling. It would be easy to give into panic and try to back out, only to become wedged between the stones and never move again.

When Flick eventually emerged into lightless open space, he felt disorientated and dizzy. He flailed his arms in the air, feeling as if he was falling, even though he knelt on solid rock. For some moments, he thought Itzama had abandoned him, and that he’d never be able to find his way back to the tunnel in the stone. He called Itzama’s name and heard a scraping sound, but the man said nothing. Then a flare of light blinded him for a moment. When his vision cleared, he saw Itzama standing some distance away, a lit torch of pitch in one hand.

‘Where are we?’ Flick asked. He had to lean against the rock wall for support to stand up.

‘Look,’ Itzama said and swept the torch around in a semi-circle. In the darkness, it left a nebulous trail of light.

It should be impossible to see what lay within the cave chamber, for it was vast. The sky was of rock, high above and its stars were pinpricks of light that may have been luminous cave beetles. Shattered beneath louring overhangs lay the remains of what Flick first thought to be a city. He saw domes of white stone that looked like immense eggshells, with holes punched into their sides. He saw a litter of masonry and the remains of paved roads. ‘Is this where your people lived?’ he asked.

Itzama too was surveying the surroundings. ‘Not mine,’ he said. ‘Earlier folk, from the first time, the first seed. They hid here from their enemies.’

Flick began to scramble over the rubble to reach the nearest building, or what was left of it. Inside, he found rough furniture, mostly made of stone, and an oven with blackened charcoal beneath it. ‘They left quickly,’ he said, for Itzama had followed him. ‘There is still food in the pots.’ He looked inside one of them. ‘Very old though.’

‘They left,’ Itzama said. ‘It is here you will find some of what you seek.’

Flick laughed coldly. ‘I’m not seeking anything. I’m learning to ‘be’, simply that.’

Itzama did not dispute this, but left the dwelling, taking the torch with him, in a train of lurching shadows.

Flick paused for a moment, opened himself up to the atmosphere of the place with reluctance. ‘No,’ he said aloud. ‘Nothing here for me.’

He left the building and found Itzama sitting on a fallen boulder, his hands dangling between his knees. The torch had been stuck into the dark earth nearby. ‘Sometimes, it happens against our will,’ he said.

‘What?’ Flick asked.

‘People touch us in certain ways, and we are marked.’

Flick could not suppress an instinctive shudder. ‘I’m not marked. Why have you brought me here? If you think I’m to learn something, then tell me.’

‘I am a memory, walking in shadow.’

Flick sighed in impatience. ‘You are an actor in a play,’ he said and pulled the torch from the ground. If he was here, he might as well explore.

The ruins tumbled over a wide gentle slope that led up to the rock wall. The white stone glowed in the darkness; there must be another source of light. The air was cold and strangely odourless. Pools of oily water glistened dully as he passed them. The stones of the fallen buildings were gigantic. Perhaps they had been felled by an earth tremor, for Flick could not imagine what else could have caused the devastation. People had lived here, yet little sense of them remained. It was an arid, scoured place. Flick realised that, to him at that time, the whole world felt that way. He wanted to go back, so desperately. He wanted to wake in his bed at Saltrock, with Seel beside him, the Seel had had known, who had taught him and cared for him. Before Cal. Before Pellaz. When the world had been full of hope and promise.

Wearily, he squatted down amid the rubble and pressed the fingers of one hand against his eyes. His chest had turned to stone. He couldn’t weep. There must be a doorway back to the past. There had to be a way to undo all that had been done. Flick could almost feel it, a shimmering portal nearby, just beyond his perceptions. If he could only learn to see it, he could stand up and walk through it, and the past months would never have been.

Itzama had crept up behind him, for Flick could feel his presence strongly. ‘It was around here,’ Itzama said, ‘but difficult to find now. They closed it down before they left.’

‘What?’ Flick asked.

‘The gate,’ Itzama replied. ‘You would want to look through it.’

Flick shuddered because Itzama’s words so echoed what he’d just been thinking. ‘What kind of gate?’

‘The kind his horses use, or so I heard. He was not the first to discover it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Flick stood up. ‘Don’t talk to me in riddles, it’s too tiring.’

‘I don’t mean to do that,’ Itzama said, and in the torchlight, he appeared genuinely contrite.

‘What gate?’ Flick said. ‘Whose horses?’

‘A powerful being,’ Itzama said. ‘He learned about the gates, and he found creatures of flying energy to go between them.’

‘How can you know about that?’ Flick demanded. ‘We know nothing ourselves.’

‘If you knew, you would be less easy to control,’ Itzama said. ‘Such has always been the way.’ He began to walk further up the slope.

Flick got up and hurried after him. He caught hold of Itzama’s arm. ‘If you know anything about Wraeththu, you must tell me,’ he said. ‘And you must tell me how you know.’

‘I know only that the earth dreams,’ Itzama said, ‘and in her dreams, she thinks of ways to make her children grow. She will use whatever means she can to change them. But what is perfect in a dream is different in reality. The children have wills of their own, and go their own way. They wake up into life and forget the mother. They forget all that was golden they learned in a dream.’

Flick remembered his dream of Pellaz. ‘Perhaps some of us do remember,’ he said. ‘Some of us might have learned to know when we are dreaming.’

Itzama laughed. ‘Now, you sound like me. I am a great teacher.’

‘How do you know about us?’ Flick asked.

‘I know because you were inevitable,’ Itzama said. ‘Your advent was written in the landscape aeons ago. We knew that you would come.’

‘We?’

‘I know about the horses because I have seen them.’

‘Show them to me.’

‘Then find the gate. Look in the earth for it.’ Itzama gestured. ‘It was around here, I’m sure.’

Flick pushed back his hair and squinted at the ground. ‘What do we look for?’

‘Its light. The gates were constructed upon places of power, which can never be destroyed. You can only hide them.’ He pointed at the ground. ‘Dig there.’

‘Dig?’ Flick felt around and picked up a sharp-sided stone. He dragged it across the dark soil. ‘This is pointless.’ But even so, he began to dig. He pulled at the moist earth with his bare hands, and it was as if something was pulling him downwards. His digging became more frantic, earth flew up around him, and stones and shards of pottery.

‘There,’ Itzama hissed in encouragement.

‘No light,’ Flick said.

‘It is violet,’ Itzama said. ‘You will find it.’

Flick’s fingers were hurting now. He had ripped his nails and his skin. But he was compelled to continue, his limbs working automatically. There was something… something. He pulled at the ground, and there was a face below him. A white marble face like a statue. But then it opened its eyes, and the eyes were full of a terrible rage. The mouth stretched in a silent scream. Flick jumped back with a cry as if he’d been punched by a giant fist. He fell heavily and felt his spine jar. Some hideous creature was going to come up out of the earth, and its proximity filled him with a primal, indescribable horror. He knew he was not ready to look through the gate, whatever it was. He was not the one to do it. When Itzama bent down to touch him, he yelled and curled into a ball.

‘Hush,’ said Itzama. ‘You are so close. You found the guardian.’

‘No,’ Flick gasped. ‘There’s nothing here, nothing I want to see.’ His hands felt numb. He could only hold them against his chest like claws. ‘Take me back! Take me back!’

Itzama made a soft sound, and lifted Flick in his arms. Flick wanted only to sink into an embrace that was stronger than he was. He wanted feathers to close over his head. He wanted sleep. It must be so late now. In the outer world, dawn would be seeping over the land, pushing back the purple night. The stars would fade away. Strange how the night revealed as much as it concealed. The earth disappeared into blackness, yet the heavens came to life. Night left no room for the mundane. It could speak only in terms of mystery and in the stars show hints of all that is unknown.

Chapter Nine

Flick could not remember how Itzama managed to get him back to the cave where they lived. When he first awoke, he thought perhaps he’d had a strange and vivid dream, but then he felt the pain in his fingers and saw that his arms were filthy, his hands cut. Itzama was not there. Flick lay on his back for a while, his mind strangely empty. Then he jumped up and ran to the place where the tunnel led to the underworld. He peered into it, tried to squeeze himself down it, but it was too small, and he could see where it ended in a wall of rock only a few feet back.

‘Sorcerer trickster,’ he said aloud. ‘Are you really what you claim to be?’

Flick went outside to wash himself in the clear water of the stream. He had to take control again, make some sense of what was happening. He knew he’d been offered something amazing the previous night, but also knew in his heart it was not his purpose to discover that knowledge. In that perhaps, Itzama overestimated him. Itzama had said he wanted to teach him, but there had been no teaching so far, only stories and tricks. Flick’s caste training within the Wraeththu belief system had never progressed very far. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been interested in pursuing his studies, or that Seel had openly discouraged it, just that life hadn’t really called for it in Saltrock. Flick had lived very much in the real world. If he had used magic it had been nothing more than pouring intention into a meal or into the work he did with the animals. He had liked order and simple rituals of existence.

But magic is in us,
Flick thought.
We are awake to the world, and that is part of it.

Flick resolved it was time to do something about it. That evening, Itzama reappeared as usual, as Flick was cooking the evening meal. Flick smiled to himself, thinking that the preparation of food seemed to have become his role in life. Itzama came to him at sundown as Seel had always done, hungry after a day’s work. Flick did not mind about it. He enjoyed cooking. When he handled the ingredients and worked his personal magic on them, conjuring up the mouth-watering aromas, he felt at peace. He had not realised that before either.

Flick handed Itzama a plate of vegetables fried in rabbit fat, along with the ever-present mushrooms, which had become part of every meal. ‘This is magic,’ Flick said. ‘I take the raw ingredients and create something different from them. I use the energy of fire to transform them.’

Itzama sat down cross-legged beside the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said, and began to eat.

‘So teach me,’ Flick said.

Itzama glanced up.

‘Isn’t that what you said you’d do?’ Flick asked. ‘I appreciate what you tried to show me last night, but I’m not ready for that. I need to start at the beginning. Among my people, I am Neomalid, that is the second level of the first tier in our caste system. Caste is not to do with social position, as in the old world, but with magical training. I have been taught the basics of manipulating energy, but have hardly put it into practice. If anything, I’ve forgotten all I know. Now, I need to remember it, and learn more. I need to know myself, and how to transcend fear.’

Itzama smiled. ‘I was presumptuous, perhaps, to assume I could teach you anything.’

‘You are a shaman, you say. What does that mean? How is it different to what I do?’

‘People like me have a specific function. We leave our bodies to work for our community in the other world. I was taught to alter my state of consciousness in such a way I could walk with the spirits. The spirits give to us the knowledge. We learn from them and pass on what we know to our people.’

‘Spirits like Coyote.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I must do this also. Take me with you. Coyote is a trickster, but I have him by the tail and I won’t let go.’

‘You are a very beautiful woman,’ said Itzama.

‘Coyote tricks,’ Flick said. ‘It won’t work. I know what I am.’

‘You people have a wonderful gift that you think is a toy,’ Itzama said. ‘You have passed beyond human, yet you can’t let it go.’

‘I don’t disagree,’ Flick said. ‘You’re not telling me anything I hadn’t worked out for myself. But there are those among us who do have great knowledge and who use the gift properly, if not wisely.’

Itzama paused for a moment, then said. ‘I would like to hear the story of how you came to be here. I wanted to ask before, but the time was not right. Are you ready now to tell me?’

Flick laughed. ‘I would have thought you’d have read my mind and found that out for yourself.’

Itzama rested his elbows on his knees, and cupped his chin in his hands. ‘It is your turn for the story.’

‘It began,’ Flick said, ‘when a har named Cal came to Saltrock, the town where I lived, some years ago.’

Itzama shook his head. ‘No, that is not your story. How did you come to be here as you are? What is your beginning?’

Flick put his hands over his face. In the darkness, he looked into the past. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, his voice muffled through his hands. ‘It is like a dream.’

‘Try.’

‘Something… something had happened,’ Flick said. ‘I was at home, and we were preparing to leave. Packing. My mother was crying and my father wasn’t there. A truck was coming for us and we were going to go someplace else. There was a war going on, but inside the war, yet outside of it, was Wraeththu. It was like a ghost haunting us, a scavenger at the edge of the battle zones, seeking the weakest. There were drugs I had to take, because when the call came no one could ignore it. You just got up, like you were sleepwalking, and went out of the house. You’d find yourself with your nose pressed against a fence, so desperate to get through it, you’d want to push your flesh through the wire and fall into a thousand pieces. You believed that if you did that, on the other side, your body would remake itself and you could walk away, find the source of the call.’

Itzama said nothing. The only sound was the pop of twigs in the fire and the soft call of a nightbird beyond the cave.

Flick looked up, directly into Itzama’s eyes. ‘I didn’t stop taking the drugs, not once. I remember going outside, carrying a box that was so heavy. I remember thinking about all I’d had to leave behind, and I was afraid for the future. They told us there were safe havens, but I couldn’t believe it. Everything was falling apart. It felt like the end of the world.

‘I saw the big truck and our neighbours were getting into it. People were running around and there was so much noise. There was fire in the sky to the east and the sound of explosions. I remember standing in this little pool of quiet, looking around. Sound just faded away, and it was like watching a silent movie. Then I saw him. Among the trees in the yard opposite. Tall and dark. I saw his long coat, his big boots. He just looked at me. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t even curious. I just thought, that is another way, another road, and it is looking at me. I put down the box and went to him.

‘He was har, of course, slinking like the ghost I believed them all to be among the panicking human population. On the lookout, seeking souls. I couldn’t hear the call, because of the drugs, but I could see the road. Does that make sense? I had to get away. There was nothing left. It was like a portal opening onto the land of the dead, and it was so easy to walk down it, to walk away. It didn’t matter that I might be giving up my life. I was so tired. I wanted to get away from the noise and the fear and the uncertainty. What I felt when I looked at him, was sureness. This was an illusion, but it didn’t matter. Something inside me knew that this was perhaps my only chance.

‘He took me to a place that was some miles away. We walked there, and hardly spoke. He offered me a drink and it felt good to be walking beside him, swigging liquor like an adult, in this… this unbelievable calm. All around us, the city was burning, but it was like we were spirits, and it couldn’t touch us. Military vehicles were screaming past us, and we walked through a place where there was gunfire, but I’m sure that any bullets would have passed straight through me without damaging my body. I didn’t even know his name.

‘We went underground beneath this half fallen tower, and there were about a dozen hara down there, as well as a lot of human boys who’d obviously been taken from the mayhem above. It was then I met Orien. He came to each of us in turn, and asked us questions. Can’t remember what. His voice was soft, and he looked to me like an angel, not man, not woman, but something of both. When he put his hand on your head, you could not be afraid. Light came out of him. Before the morning came, he said to me, “I will take you somewhere.” Just me. None of the others. We went up into the morning, and the city was obscured by smoke. It wasn’t real any more. Everything was so quiet. I thought we would walk into eternity, but Orien had a military jeep and we drove in that instead. We drove for days. Orien took me to Saltrock, and there he incepted me. I became Wraeththu, and it seems as if that was when my life really began. Orien chose Seel to be the one to initiate me into the mysteries of aruna, and we stayed together afterwards. It was perfect, until Cal came…’

Itzama’s expression had become troubled. He was staring at the fire.

‘How did you escape it?’ Flick asked. ‘How are you still human?’

‘I’m not of this time,’ Itzama said.

Flick made a sound of exasperation. ‘I’ve told you about myself. At least repay the compliment.’

‘Let’s just say it passed me by,’ Itzama said.

‘You were strong enough to resist the call, weren’t you,’ Flick said. ‘But was that the right thing to do?’

‘I was not chosen as you were,’ Itzama said.

‘I wasn’t special. Everyone was chosen. Wraeththu were trying to save those who were left.’

‘It must be an amazing thing,’ Itzama said, ‘to find a person and to change them in that way, to make them like you.’

‘I can’t incept you!’ Flick said.

‘That was not what I meant. I was simply imagining the great power of it. Hara must enjoy that very much.’

‘It’s not selfish.’

Itzama uttered a caustic laugh. ‘No, it makes the world a better place, does it not? You pass on the change, the awakening, and then everyone is enlightened and aware.’

Flick bridled at the sarcasm. ‘You asked me, I told you. I’m not prepared to justify my kind.’

‘The gift is abused. You still fight amongst yourselves, each thinking they know the one true way. None of you do. Not yet. And you will have to work hard to find it, otherwise you will suffer the same fate as humanity.’ He made an abrupt gesture with one hand. ‘I see now that inception is only the beginning. It does not bestow mastership. It is merely the initiation, like a key to the door of the mysteries.’

‘The key…’ Flick nodded. ‘I dreamed of keys the first night I was here.’ He waited a moment, then said, ‘Am I first har you’ve met?’

‘In waking life, yes,’ Itzama replied. ‘It has been interesting to observe you.’

‘I’m sure,’ Flick said coldly.

‘Tell me the rest now,’ Itzama said. ‘The story you want to cut free.’

Even as he was telling it, Flick was thinking, this is not a good story. It taints whoever hears it. I feel as if I’m betraying my tribe for revealing us to be barbaric and stupid, like humans. Yet what loyalty should I have to Wraeththu? I have been betrayed and abused by my own kind, and the only unconditional kindness shown to me recently has been by a human, a member of the race we have come to replace, to expunge.

Itzama did not look at him as he related the tale. He stared into the fire, as if seeking insight in the flames. And Flick found the more he talked, so the easier it became, and he remembered details he had forgotten. Suddenly, the gleam of morning light upon the handles of his knives in the kitchen seemed as important to the whole as the sight of Cal walking away from the Nayati. Suddenly, the story of his flight from humanity seemed more real than the one he was relating now. This couldn’t have happened. It was too terrible, too unbelievable. And yet it had happened.

At the end of it, Flick was weeping. Itzama made no sound, nor reached out to touch him. After some minutes, Flick raised his head, and cried, ‘I hate them! I hate them all! How could I have been so stupid, so taken in?’

‘It is yourself you hate,’ Itzama murmured.

‘Yes!’ Flick punched his own thighs with both hands. ‘I am a fool. How could I let Seel treat me like that? How could I have played Cal’s game so willingly?’

‘You did it out of generosity,’ Itzama said, his voice still quiet and calm. ‘You only gave, and if in your innocence, that was abused, you should not judge yourself for it.’

Flick shook his head vigorously, and the cave spun around him. ‘I can’t help it. I was weak, and yet it was Cal who did it. He ruined our lives. He turned Seel into somehar else. He bewitched me. He bewitched Orien too. All of us.’

‘It cannot be undone,’ Itzama said. ‘There is no point in placing blame. You are far from it now, but you cannot move forward until you let it go from inside.’

‘I am so full of hate,’ Flick said. ‘And it’s terrible, the way it makes me feel. It makes me a bad person.’ He glanced up at Itzama. ‘That is what Orien said, on the night when he fell into trance. He said that his feelings for Cal made him a bad person, and Orien was never that.’

Itzama made a languid gesture with both hands. ‘Then that should tell you. Your friend Cal is very damaged, and his pain has become his whole reason for being. Do not follow his path. Do not let this tragedy become your life.’