Just an extra disclaimer, this is the really gruesome chapter. If you feel like you'll be terribly offended by sexual and physical violence, rather unflinchingly described, don't read.
Again, artistic liberties taken.
With a relatively leisurely star-off that morning, they would not reach the temple until late afternoon. The sun beat down drunkenly upon Ardeth's well swaddled head, though the bright fists still penetrated his weak sense of protection.
Brighter than the sun, he could feel her eyes rip bits of his flesh from beneath his clothing. Only for seconds though would they rest long enough for his suspicion to alert, darker than the sun and hotter than the sand; black heat blazing small grooves into his smooth flesh.
Drostan's words had unsettled Ardeth. Would she truly marry him? As he thought on it, it was her best bet in life. Better than any life he could give. Racism and custom would prevent her from obtaining any substantial place in the presence of his tribe, let alone as a permanent resident. And to even think of marrying her was foolish; she would never convert, nor would he. And then, simply considering the reasons why she wouldn't be able to make a life for herself with him was ridiculous as these thoughts would be put under the assumption that she would agree to be with him at all. She had shown slight flirtation and one brief, half-hearted moment of mild romanticism with him against what seemed to be a deep-rooted prejudice that he knew the strength of on the basis that he had felt it's breed before. Most are unable to live a life without feeling it. For all he knew, she was toying with him out of an enjoyed hatred of his people...
Yet she knew who he was. Medjai. And she knew his loyalty and was honoring of it. She knew his mythology, his language. She might have even respected them. Then why? Why was she in the desert now? Why would she travel with the Bedouins she indiscriminately hated?
No, but how... how was the question of Boann. Never why. For how did she know so much about him. She knew him before she'd met him, it seemed. She knew his body and his mind and his heart and most of all, his memories. She knew him with an old heart, a heart that has lived many lives at once, it seemed. She was wise, he thought. And not for being illiterate; he knew many a man without that knowledge who would be in every way more intelligent than the most prestigious student at Oxford. It was a wiseness that was unfamiliar in a woman's eyes, in an adult's eyes, in a child's eyes, in a dying man's eyes. It didn't belong anywhere. He didn't know where it belonged. It bereft him of logical conclusiveness.
As they reached the temple, its ruins towering like dust-smothered building blocks, long abandoned by the gods, the sun fell heavier in the sky. Evie excitedly began unraveling her tools, while Adil made the relatively short trek to the nearest watch post of the Medjai to alert them of where they were, and that they would stay there the night.
Evelyn was the only other up besides Ardeth and Boann by nightfall. She was still working away inside the temple. The others were inside tents, beneath fallen pillars, taking refuge in the large arms of the ruins as the sun grew small against the night's gigantic eye.
Boann was sitting on the ankle of a fallen and mostly eroded statue of Bast. Her cigarette made her looked like a torch pillar that had just been snuffed under a strong wind, the smoke flying northward, to an unpleasant green. It had taken until long after Adil had returned from alerting the watch for Ardeth to summon up the courage to speak to Boann again. His feet felt light as ribbons of smoke as he walked across broken stone and sand to reach her slender, rigid back. He sat, a bit away, more on Bast's calf than her ankle. His dark eyes peered over tattooed cheekbones at her profile. Her good eye was facing him, and if it weren't for the band of cloth that wrapped around her forehead still on that side, he thought she might have looked normal.
"May I?" And her eye darted to where his fingers were pinching the air by her mouth. She loosened her lips for him to slip the cigarette from their sanctuary. As the thin paper and tobacco left her hot mouth, he could feel it's sad shiver and sympathize.
As he coughed heartily with the inhalation, he was repaid with the reaction he had hoped for: a short, taut laugh from the woman. They were silent for several moments, her cigarette fading in between his coarse fingers, shying down to nothingness in his hand.
"Do you remember," she said, her voice sounding dreamlike, spreading onto the air like a thick layer of charcoal on parchment. "... Do you remember what you were like before you killed someone for the first time."
Someone... not a person, but a someone. "Yes, I do." He did. His first someone.
"I don't," she said, peeling off a callous from the crevice of her right hand. He noticed, futilely, at that moment that she had no scars on her hands, nor indeed anywhere else but her face. Those chicken-wire tracks pounding their way down her cheek, jigging and fiddling from beneath their eternal bandage.
"Why don't you tell me about her?" She asked, almost innocently, pleadingly.
"I don't know what you're..."
"You do, you do, you do. Goddamn you Ardeth you know what I'm talking about. Tell me before I break you're bloody skull." Her voice was a soft scream, the softest scream Ardeth had ever heard. He complied, his mind in too much pain to understand anything hiding beneath the curtain of her words.
"I was a year from graduating, getting my license. I'd stayed in as long as I could. In truth I was... afraid to become a real doctor. I was afraid..." It was hard for him to say, but he had a feeling she already knew that he was afraid, always afraid and that not saying it was pointless now. "So I began my apprenticeship much later than others. And, um, a young woman, who had been thrown from her horse at her home... it was her birthday and, the horse was a gift, she was riding it at her party. It threw her down, broke three ribs and her collarbone." He swallowed so hard he felt his tongue go the whole way down. "The collarbone is usually very easy to reset and heal, unless it's too close to a lung, in which case one would have to operate. I was only meant to reset it, but I soon found myself in an emergency operation with only a temporary license. It was going to puncture her lung."
"So I went in. And as I was, pulling," At this he began to motion with his hands, clasping with difficulty a tangible, yet still imaginary bone. "– well, or pushing... um, both, I suppose – the collarbone away from the lung and... um, the..." he breathed in deeply, and was unsurprised to find her chest still with held breath. "The... I was pushing and pulling and trying so hard to save her breath... trying so hard... and when the bone snapped under my... guiding, guiding hands, snapped completely off, the pressure sent one of the snapped ribs strait into her heart. She was killed instantly..."
He felt it hot on his cheek. His pallor was so white with fear that the blush was visible in the darkness of the air at being to vulnerably exposed. But he was there now, and couldn't bother with blushing tears.
"It was her... fucking birthday and I... I couldn't tell her parents, I didn't tell them. I made someone else. I followed protocol I... did what I was supposed to do but, um, well. A freak accident, I guess. That's what they called it. I called it an accident by a freak."
He felt his heavy chest lift with the containment of a withering crack of tears, and he let the water rush back into his sanded cheeks.
"You came back, then."
"Yes."
"You came back because you thought that you really were a killer, like your people. You were meant to kill others, not save them. Kill them to save them not save them to save them."
Ardeth felt himself choking. "Doing it for a greater good, instead of for seventeen year-old girls who fall off their shiny new horses."
He felt his composure return like a new coat of plaster over his entire body. Fresh enough to let his judgement loose. To let it be aware and able to question.
"You know. You knew, why did you... how I don't understand. I don't understand how you know it all. How can you know my head so well, you barely know me."
"Yet you loved me."
"I still love you."
"And you barely know me."
"Shut up!" And he stood with a powerful displacement of air. But he didn't walk away. He just stood there, towering above her like a statue. Perfect on the outside, but all broken and molded and eroded and replaced bits on the inside. Break him, and his heart and lungs would cut your hands.
"It gave it to me. I know what's in Evelyn's head, Drostan's, Rick's... I can see bits of Adil, his daughter. I know everything in your head. Every cold comfort of your stepmother, every empty glance of your father because it gave it to me."
"What? What gave you this?"
"The Horizon. When they were taking it out, with a knife, all of it out to save, the Horizon gave me it's sight for mine."
Ardeth stared down at her, and then at the line where the land made love to the stars. A place forever unreachable, an imaginary place. But for an imaginary place, it was certainly able to see all of us as real things. No matter how far or close, up or down it could see so very well the lives and thoughts of us all. A bit like God, he thought. Was God just a horizon? Or, as she said, the Horizon? Cutting through to see the insides: Of a burning building; a frightened husband with a little child bride; a mother who gave up everything that wasn't stolen from her...
Yes. She was right. The Horizon did give her it's sight. Like the very natural sensory compensation – where the nose becomes stronger when the eyes become weaker, or the ears – made supernatural. A third eye was opened. A third eye dancing in the Horizon over the heads of those around her.
"Boann why are you here? I can't read your mind, you have to tell me the old fashioned way."
"I'm here for her."
"You're mother?" He said, still standing, but now gazing down at her, the whites of his eyes standing out against his night darkness. But she did not look afraid. She stared up at his, sandy tracks of tears razing her left cheek. It was a trick of the stars, he told himself, that made him believe they were also on her right.
"Yes. I'm here for her. She died here."
"Bedouins, right?" He said. It seemed so obvious now, he was unsure of why it alluded him. It was four words that brought it to him. He felt like they were the most important four words in her thickly curled head. "Tuareg?"
"No. As far as I know they're hardly Muslim. No, they're out for bits. For, uh, tokens. Human bits."
Ardeth nodded. He had encountered such bandits before. Taking fingers, hands, feet, whole limbs. Ears and eyes and hair and testicles. Keep sakes. Sacred, in a perverse way, to them. Human loot.
"Me ma, she..." Boann was looking more and more distant. She was staring at his feet until he sat back down beside her. He took her eye then in his, took her back to him.
"It's just me, Annie. It's just me. I want to know. I must."
"I know..." She answered, sadly. It was a while before she continued. "She brought Drostan and I here, and she and Diarmuid were still married and all..." Boann's face seemed to flash with an unfamiliar color. She continued with a mirthless glee on her face in a different direction then she'd started. "Me da... He wund't good to 'er. He wund't much of a good man. She was a barmaid at the pub, all good and seventeen years old when she got pregnant with me. He was a regular, and, see, 'e had these eyes. These brilliant blue eyes like ice in water, like holes in a frozen lake or flowers. Really bloody blue. She just... she married him, though, ye know. Catholic and all."
"'e was real bad to 'er. I remember once, sittin' on the floor. I must've been three'r'four. She comes walkin' out of the bedroom and she's limpin' all good and like. But ye see, Diarmuid'd never smack much. He never made bruises. She'd just be limpin' out cause he was a hard man to take on top ya."
Boann stopped. She looked like a line drawing right then. Something two dimensional and strait out of a medical book. Ardeth wasn't sure if she'd continue. "And, uh, she locked me in the closet with her. She got in the tub with a bottle. I din know it was soap in it at the time. I just remember staring at her foot which was danglin' off the side of the tub. I heard the washing noise as she washed 'im out of her inside, but I was starin' at her foot the whole time. Da din scare me back then 'cause he'd never touched me. Not once. I think he told me I looked like a horse once, which was comic 'cause I'm the spittin' image o'him, but other than that I dun think he spoke to me either. But he touched her. And she washed 'im out while he banged down on the door and was screamin' and screamin', 'Kell, don'tchya dare don'tchya dare do that Kell.'" His voice was softer when it came from her mouth than her own was. "And I know now what she was a thinkin'. She was thinkin' 'bout 'er name, and how she'd never let anyone call her Kelly 'cause it was too pretty. Well, now she really wasn't pretty. She wondered if they'd ever call 'er Kelly now... I'd have, but no one else would have...
"I din understand when we left. But we did. Kell was still married, but by the time we got to Egypt on da's coffee tin cash she din care no more. She found the first bloke to marry her white white self and converted. Very bad for a Catholic to marry more than once in a life. Diarmuid even waited until he at least knew she was dead to get married again. But she married 'im, and then she... two years after we moved there, she left." Boann's face had a blank smile spread like dripping over her skin.
"Left?"
"Mhmm," she said, all-too-cheerily. "She left Drostan and I on the floor and went with Rashid to the fucking center of the desert. She said she'd be gone a few days, taught me how to work the gas stove and left. She left us there. She taught a goddamn seven year-old to work a stove and left...
"She din come back, ye see. Weeks later and she din come back. A few years after that Rashid reappeared, good shaven and everything. I saw 'im in the market in Cairo. He told us what had happened. They wore red, 'e said. And they let him go. He said 'cause he wasn't white. I think he gave her up, though, to save himself... I always said I'd kill him after I'd kill them. I never got around to killin' 'im though..."
She took a long drink of her own mouth. Her eye jumped in it's time wheel, skipping over a hump, a mound of flesh. Ardeth perceived the jump after she began speaking again, but was unsure of whether to call her on the skip in time or not.
"When we went back to Ireland, I was all scarred up. I was bandaged and feverish and sick..."
"They sent you off before you healed?"
"Aye. As soon as I was conscious she sent us away. If I'd a been healed, there wouldn't have been much reason to kick us out, would there have been? No. No there wouldn't have been."
The cigarette was down to the flesh on Ardeth's fingers. He flicked it away with a seething of his teeth at the burn before letting her continue.
"I was all messed up in me face, but Diarmuid took us in. He was livin' above the pub still, and had married a woman named Brigit. She'd had a baby by him by the time we got there. Livin' with him... Sweet Jesus... we tried to get out. Drostan, it was easy for 'im. He was bloke and he wasn't so fucking ugly as me. But me... I... Da din love me. I knew that because of the Horizon. I knew 'e din love me at all. One bit. I disgusted him." He wasn't sure if she was choking on tears or hatred. He inwardly laughed as he realized that tears and hate must be the constant struggle in her heart. He was seeing that now. "I had to find another way out."
"Brady."
"Aye. Brady. But Brady din love me neither. It was hard 'nough for 'im to marry me. I think 'e 'ated me. He was a truck loader and 'ad no money. I couldn't even move in with 'im, cause he, he had no room. Had to stay at me da's still. So, it was useless... and I think," she paused, as if unsure how to make these words fit. It was almost as if she'd never told anyone this before. "I think he tried to get killed, you know? I think he was goin' for it. 'Cause 'e was married to a sick freak-thing like me and 'cause he couldn't help. He couldn't help me, and he couldn't do it 'imself... so 'e walked into that gun... Everybody made fun of 'im and they made fun of me."
Ardeth tried to touch her hand, but she drew away. She was focusing on her boots and her shoulders were twitching ever so slightly
"They made fun of us, and I let them. I let them tease us and fuck with us. Just like I let Brady think I was a bad person and just like I let 'im die. I let 'im go out there and die like that. I let 'im die. Just like I let them fuck around with us. Just like I let him fuck me." She paused, her mouth fat at the place somewhere in between crying and laughing. "I let him fuck me."
Ardeth's breath rose slowly, then crept from his chest in an almost painful motion. He was staring at her almost perfect profile when he asked in a meek mockery of his last words, "Brady?"
"No. Diarmuid."
Ardeth felt any movement in his eyes pause very, very slowly. He let that name take register, remembered that it was not unfamiliar and then, against his own control, clamped his hand against his mouth. 'So was he. So was he.' Oh God...
"Me da. 'E din love me. I knew that. But when he fucked me it felt like he might love me. It was the only time he'd touch me or talk to me." Ardeth was unable to speak as she continued, rambling with a tearless eye. "I think he'd dun it cause I din look like 'er. He wanted me to look like 'er and be like 'er and I din, I looked like 'im. But I wanted to look like 'er, too.
"Brady'd tried to stop it but, he din have the money for it, or the power, really. He thought he'd stop after the marriage but he din and I din even though, you know, I hated it, I really really hated it. But Brady din know that, bless his heart, he din know. He thought we were all goin' to Hell, and we were. Bless Brady's heart, he din want to go to Hell. He just din want to go to Hell."
"Your stepmother," Ardeth said finally, his voice partially regained. "Why didn't she...?"
"You dun think she tried? She tried so hard but she couldn't leave him, and with me and the baby with 'er. Helen was so small when it started, it started a month or so after I got back, I remember, 'cause I was still 'avin' to wear a bandage. But Brigit wasn't me ma, she couldn't do what Ma did.
"Drostan..." Boann's eyes softened, now. "Drostan did his best. Between Diarmuid bein' good to 'im and bad to me and between 'im wantin' to help and wantin' to do what da was gettin' to do all along, he did his best. He got me in the IRA. It wasn't till then, eighteen years-old I realized what this was doin'. Realized that this wasn't what I wanted. Realized the difference between wantin' something and lettin' it happen. But I still..."
She still wanted that love. Ardeth could see that. She still needed that love from her father.
"But war wasn't for me. Not that war. That was not my war. My war was here. And still is here. It's here."
Her eyes then took on the darkness of determination. Ardeth knew that color well, it was a bright black that made all the world look blurry, save for what you are truly trying to find. That, he knew, was always crisp and clear.
"I'd tried once before... but I'm different now. I've been different for nine years, and I'll be different for nine years more. Until they kill me this time." She closed her eyes, a sick bliss taken on in her words. "They'll kill me here, or I'll kill them, then kill meself. Either way, I won't be losing another eye."
"That's how you lost it. You were thirteen..." He nearly suffocated on the number.
"Yes," she said, her voice whimsically wrapping around her own head.
"The token tribe... they took your eye as a token..."
"No," and at that, he face turned to meet his, her eye burning with a sad hellfire and angel's wings both at once. "they tried to. I moved, though, I moved my head until there was nothing left but a bit of skin and a lot of scratches...
"I 'ad meself a bloke back then, when livin' with Hadya. He'd taken me maiden from me and had read out loud to me my father's response to m'ma's death, and on my thirteenth birthday, 'e gave me a nice shiny knife. After Rashid'd told us about me ma's killers, I got to lookin' around. Got to talkin'. They'd come into Cairo sometimes to sell the good hairs for wigs and such, or other hard loot – jewelry and cloth. Well, they came, and I intended on buying from them revenge.
"But I couldn't get at 'em. I tried but... I was too small. Drostan was so scared. I think back on it now and I shouldna brought him with me but I did. And when they closed in on me, when they opened up my eye to take it... I just kept my head movin'. I didn't let them take it. I wouldn't let them take it."
"So they tore it all out. Bit by bit," Ardeth said, entranced by her face at this point. He couldn't get away from it, this time. A warrior, a doctor, a lover, a human, a horizon... whatever he was and whatever she was, they were meant to touch.
"Yes... I lost it... I don't know how I survived. Drostan tells me a man made them leave. He made them leave all by himself, and then took me up to him. Took me to the hospital. I was unconscious by that point." She gave a weak smile, her hand shaking as she pulled out her matches. "And he was right. That was my first... sight. Was the man. I dunno who he was, but he took me in 'is arms and until recently I've never been held that way before." The unlit cigarette betrayed the trembling of her lips. Boann had never said so much to someone before. She'd always been told things, not the other way around. Told memories and moments, thoughts and feelings. Why she would confide in him would have baffled him had he not by that time been assured with every hair on his body that she loved him, too. He was never given the sight of the Horizon, or of whatever it is that she thought gave her this gift, but he could see that much at this point.
With a trembling hand she attempted to light the cigarette. When she was unable to, he watched her finally break down. Tears fell from her shaking eyelid, and her lips – lips that were now beyond perfect to him – curled into terrible shapes. Curved shapes that at once resembled both the blades of knives and the manes of horses.
He quickly took her face in his hands, acting on instinct now. He felt he had the courage to towards her, now. A wall had been broken between them. A well had been shattered and he felt wet to the bone with the water.
She was shaking her head at him, her eye unsure. Now, it was unmistakable that wetness was falling from beneath the bandage. Her entire face was so wet with the tears and the sweat of the exertion of her confessions. He held her hands so tight he could feel the blood-filled flesh pulsate over the tops of his own hands. He just didn't want her to move away again, didn't want her to close up. He would never make her fix that well.
"Why do I feel this way Ardeth?" Her voice crackled like a great stone breaking under the weight of her tears. "I can't do anything around you. I don't want to do anything. I just want to lay there and know that you're layin' there, too. I've never felt that way before. Even when I wanted to tear off my whole face it hurt so much, I always needed to move. I should want to kill you... I should want you to kill me..."
"I didn't kill your mother, Boann," he said, his voice a rumbling whisper against her good cheek.
"But I did!" She exclaimed, her spittle uncontrollably flying onto his face. "I did kill her. I drove her out. She's the first person I'd ever killed. No mother leaves a seven year old child there for nothin'! It was me she wanted to throw in the desert! It was me she wanted to wash outa her and she should have. If you'da seen her, Ardeth, you'd agree. She was so beautiful, and I'm so ugly."
"No, no you're not."
"I am... and I hate that, and I hate her. I hate her for 'aving me and for bein' so much prettier than I'll ever be. I was out to avenge myself that day. To avenge her on myself. I wanted to face who she faced and kill them like she couldn't so that I could be better than her, do something right from her for once. I was avenging myself and taking vengeance out on myself for hating her so much. I didn't expect to kill them, I still don't. I just didn't want to live knowing that I can't help but love the one person I've ever hated so much in my life. I still don't... except..."
She was squeezing his hands back now. Hands that had killed, and loved, and banged a drum. Hands that were taking down, block by block, a well in which salmon swam over each other's slippery bodies, trying so hard to get free. Silvery skinned fishes, pink pink fishes lashed on top of each other like scarflesh, splashing water over the sides, just trying to get out.
She was sobbing so hard now, Ardeth felt his own salts tickle his cheeks, felt his own face contort. He couldn't help himself. She felt so human at that moment. She did not feel like a fairy or a selkie or a horizon or a well. She was so human, so breakable at that moment. He realized that he was honestly afraid of breaking her. Since becoming the leader of the Medjai, he had not felt so afraid of breaking someone.
It hurt so bad, but he knew he had to feel it. They were two people running away from things they had to except, punishing others for the hate they felt for themselves. She was crying so hard, she was crying so hard.
"Oh God Ardeth, they took... I saw, and they took her parts. I saw it with my own eye like I had been there. Like she was callin' out to me... and she was callin' out. She was callin' my name and it wasn't a pretty name, at all. At all... and they took her privates. They took her nub in her cunt away after she was dead. And..." Her entire body was shaking against his. He could feel his arms clasp around her wrists. "And... oh God oh God oh sweet Lord God... they took her hair... Ardeth they took her hair from her faceless body. She had red hair... her hair was so red and they took it. They took it and I love you..."
And he met her there. He drew her in like a dying breath and forced her face up to his. He pressed her lips so hard he felt they'd smear all the way up to her hairline. He pushed them open and kissed her with a fury of a frightened horse, kissed her with the force of a gun. She tasted like spice, like salt and sand. Her skin was drawing all the moisture out of him and he would have given it up ten fold just to feel that close to her for a few seconds more. He felt he could break open his chest and take her into his ribcage, keep her there forever. Trapping her once more into a land that lacked anything familiar to her own body and mind. Keeping her there just so that he could feel her heart beating against his bones.
But she pulled away from him, leaving his breast cold and his eyes salted. He couldn't keep her there. She was free of him, and he wouldn't have it any other way.
There was one thing, though, that could bind them. Not in a cage or in a prison, but in trust. She began to tug at the knot buried deep in her hair, her arms shaking as she cursed quietly at the knot's stubbornness. After several minutes of watching her try to untangle the knot from her hair, he softly 'shh'-ed her, slowly bringing her arms down to relax. He put his hand on her head, bringing it's black top to face his chest as he patiently undid the knot, and then letting the cloth drop to her lap. He kissed the top of her head, his lips landing on a thick layer of curls. Before lifting her head, he began to feel for her face. He felt her cheeks, her nose, her mouth, the softness of one eyelid, and the taut, leathery texture of the other. It was incredibly soft, pillowy towards the right corner, where the blade had ripped it so deep that the skin had to rise like bread over the bone in order to create enough tissue to correct the damage. Then it dipped, like a dune into her socket, where the nerve must have finally popped, and the flesh simply had to sheet over the raw hole and nerves left there. It traveled down her cheek and up to her unruly eyebrow, wrinkly and punctured in places, where stitched were obviously placed.
He lifted her head, finally. Stared into her unflinching face. Her face was incomplete, he thought, like a later Michelangelo, the right eye never chiseled into the proper detail. The marble left in it's own jagged formation, he could see the wet places where the tear ducts still sweated moisture from those pours in an attempt to lubricate an imaginary eye.
They stared at each other for several moments. One beautiful person and one ugly person; one king and one beggar; two warriors, two killers, two believers in an embrace and a kiss against the thin line of the Horizon...
The girl looks small, flat chested and sun burnt. Her two black, beady eyes stare in their wideness at the bustling flurry of the market. Peddlers and beggars and thieves bump and shove in a dance of violent appreciation. The boy is much younger, his head blonder than the sun, with freckles dotting his nose and cheekbones.
Her eyes can only see red. Red robes, red robes, where are the red robes. She has planted an ambiguous smile on her face that is betrayed by the fire in her black eyes. Her hair, cut short and in fine black curls, frames her cherubic face. Red robes, red robes, won't you trod on my eyes, won't you dace until I cut away your feet.
She runs at the sight: seven red robes, seven red head coverings. She pushes the fat woman out of her way, the sallow man is shouldered from her view. The boy follows behind blindly, just following the tan and sweat-stained dress of his cousin.
She ducks at their feet, making a deep slash in one ankle with the little silvery knife, silvery fishy knife. She smells the Nile fish being sold as she races away, drawing them into a line for her to slaughter down like chickens or cattle. One by one, she can see it in her head. She climbs the small hill, into the alley way, the market fallen somewhat below her. They are following, and closely behind them, her cousin is screaming as he tries to keep up. He is calling, "Annie, Annie," and she thinks how she hates that name. How it is far too pretty. How she'll make sure no one calls her Ann or Annie after this. After she kills them, and her mother's memory to boot.
But they are big, she thinks. But I am bigger. They are strong, but I am stronger. Am I not stronger? She cannot move her arms now. But I am stronger! She is stronger than they, yet now she can't move her legs. Stronger, stronger! Mut mama said I'd be stronger than anyone, just as long as I wanted to be. I want to be!
"Little girl, that was a nasty thing to do to my friend there," His Arabic is a hiss and slur. He signals behind him to where the seventh limps up the slope, dragging his right foot behind him. Drostan is standing behind the corner of a building, his head peaking around to see with fearful fascination the fate of his cousin, uncertain of the gravity of the situation. She'll get away, he thinks. She'll get away and we'll get some ices and it'll all be okay.
She can't move her head now. One of them it holding it still. Her black eyes dart to the man's face, the one hovering in front of her. She thinks about how it doesn't look like he has a neck or body from this angle, just a head, swivelling and swerving like a snake. Hissing at her, his words wetting her small frame.
"You have fascinating eyes... They aren't blue, like others, are they? They are so black, and so big." She feels the wind brush her arms as the knife he pulls displaces it. "They are very pretty, very pretty."
She can't get away. She will die. I will die, and so will Kell, she thought. Mama's gonna die with me now. It's either them or her, one or the other will kill the bitch, and it'll be over.
She keeps her eyes open, wanting to see that face as it plunges the knife into her, wanting to spit in his face in one last dramatic gesture. But instead she is looking at a dagger's point, right in front of her right eye. Her brow furrows as she tries to decide why they are going to kill her in her face. What are they doing? What?
"Pretty eyes don't belong to mean little girls."
Her mouth is covered, she feels the knife slip under her skin, cutting below the eyeball. Drostan is screaming with his eyes, pasted to the floor where he stands. Boann realizes that it is gone, it will be gone. Not her mother's killers or her mother's memory, but her sight. She is going to loose her eyes. As the pain seers through her tiny skull, they dart out. Out, out, out into the Horizon. She focuses on the strip on reddish whitish light, where the land makes love to the sky. The Horizon is telling her something. It is telling her what they want. They want her eyes. Did they take her mother's eyes? She couldn't let them do to her what they did to Kell. They must do something else, something different. She must be braver. They can't have it. They can't.
"Hold her head still, dammit. Stop her from moving... Shit, shit!... I broke it... What do you mean you broke it?... I sliced it down the middle is what I mean... Oh for fuck's sake... Well I'm getting as much of it as I can but she keeps moving... Her head is too strong... Make her stop!"
And they do stop. She sees them stop. A man has cried out and at his image they drop her to the ground. She can see the top of her head, but every time she tries to touch it, it is just as far away from her hand as before. She sees the man, who walks calmly, deathly through the throng of running red robes. He is scooping her up. She cannot feel it, but she can see it.
The small boy flings his body against the tall man's black clad leg, beating it and telling him to let Annie go. The man gently strokes the boys hair, letting his fingers show their size as they encompass his skull completely. Drostan calms, and takes the man's offered hand, as he walks him quickly, with the girl in his arms, to the hospital.
She sees it all. Just as she sees her form, lying in a white bed in a stone room with wide windows. They don't pay much attention to her. Her eye is bandaged and a nurse from time to time wipes the sweat from her brow. Hadya visits, cries, and leaves. She feels as if she is sitting on the ceiling. She is sitting comfortably above them all, but she cannot discern how far away she is.
The boy keeps kissing her mouth, telling her he's sorry and crying hysterically. He kisses her at least twenty times each day, and then falls asleep next to her. Her bandage covers so much of her face. She's afraid that a nasty red mark will be there when they take it off, like when she scrapped her knee and Hadya put white cloth over it so tightly. She doesn't want a big red mark on her face.
She wishes she could lie down. She wishes the boy would stop kissing her. She wishes they'd take that Goddamn bandage off.
