Chapter 38
Clarke just looked at her. This was not the response that she was expecting. Ash just decided that it was okay. She didn't ask questions. She didn't even seem upset with Clarke for what she'd told her. It was like something inside of Ash just accepted what Clarke had told her and it all made sense. None of what Clarke was going through made sense to her. None of it, but Ash just accepted it.
She took the jerky that was offered and chewed on it as she watched the warrior start to pack up their bedrolls. She wanted Ash to scream at her, tell her that they weren't going to Polis or Arkadia, but she got no further reaction. Clarke was puzzled. Ash just seemed to keep rolling with everything like it meant nothing to her, but Clarke knew that it had to be eating at Ash. Clarke was supposed to be Wanheda and didn't think that she was.
The more she thought about it, the more puzzled she got. She wondered if it was just a Grounder thing. It was like they just assumed some things were divine and they didn't need anymore explanation. She wasn't like that. She wasn't raised like that. She wondered if it was because there was no true religion on the Ark, besides survival and science, that she couldn't understand Ash's faith. But, it wasn't just Ash's faith in Keyron and things she couldn't explain. It was Ash's devotion and faith in Clarke as being the mighty Wanheda.
After eating though, she took Ash's advice. They laid back down for a while. Clarke didn't remember going back to sleep, but she must have. When she woke up again, the sun was cresting a few fingers over the horizon. Ash wasn't in the vehicle. She was just outside making sure that everything was secure. When she saw that Clarke was awake, she gave her a soft smile. That was what spurred Clarke completely out of their bed roll.
"Ready?"
"Sha," Ash replied.
Clarke closed up the back of the Rover and climbed in the front driver's seat. Ash got in the other side. She looked weary and Clarke knew it was because she didn't understand the "horseless carriage." She didn't complain too much about it either. Clarke looked at her as she started the Rover, though. She would need to teach Ash how to drive it. It would help them out later as they started to explore outside of Eden, but for now, Clarke would be the sole driver.
She reached over to turn on the radio, but forgot that she didn't have anything to plug into it. Pulling her hand back, Clarke looked over at Echo. She could see that Ash was watching her. Instead of saying or asking Ash anything, Clarke put the Rover in gear and started down the wastes toward where Arkadia should be. She knew that it would take time to get there. They would pass Polis on the way. She didn't want to be driving all day, but she knew that she would have to. She wanted to find somewhere half way to stop, but she didn't know where. It wasn't like her maps were going to do her any good. And, while the Rover was equiped with GPS, Clarke couldn't be sure that the satellites were still working, or better yet, even there.
As they drove, Ash watched Clarke steer. Clarke could tell that she was trying to learn. It was actually amusing.
"When we get closer to Arkadia, I'll let you try," Clarke told her.
Ash looked up and into Clarke's eyes.
"It actually isn't that hard. Plus, there isn't a lot for you to hit out here anymore. It will be just making sure that it is charged enough and we are taking care of it. I'm hoping that Raven still had her emergency gear to help her maintain the Rover."
"Will we need it?" Ash asked her.
"I will be helpful."
"Is there anything else there that you are hoping to find?" Ash questioned.
"I really won't know until we get there. I'm hoping that most of the Med Bay survived. I know that the tech won't help us and most of the medicine, but there will be other stuff that we can use. Plus we can grab some clothes and other stuff."
"Other stuff?"
"Jasper liked to hide his alcohol," Clarke stated.
"And, you need some alcohol?" Ash questioned.
"Need is such a big word," Clarke quipped as she pushed on the pedal harder, gaining speed.
Ash reached out and braced herself as they roared across the landscape. Clarke was just smiling. She knew how much her friends loved driving after they'd found the Rovers. It wasn't something that they needed on the Ark, but it was useful on the ground.
"Why are you smiling?"
"Just thinking about Raven and how much she would enjoy this," Clarke said truthfully.
"She liked putting herself in danger?"
Clarke laughed hard before answering, "Actually, yes, she did."
"She sounds like a good friend, then," Ash replied.
"She was," Clarke added as she let up on the gas. "She was one of the best. She took care of things for me. She could build the most amazing things out of nothing. She was so damn smart."
"I am glad that you had someone like her in your life," Ash said.
"I'm glad that she was never in Azgeda. Nia would have broken her. She was a fighter, but Nia would have destroyed her," Clarke stated somberly. "Actually, I am glad that none of them were there with me. And…I hope that whatever Ontari did to Arcadia, she did it quickly and they didn't suffer much."
"For their sakes and yours, I do, too."
"You don't believe that she did though, do you?"
"Nia or Ontari, no, it is doubtful. But, I don't think that they oversaw the massacre themselves. They would have sent a general and the troops. Nia would have expected nothing less than total annihilation, though. She believed that you were worse than the Mountain because you were on the surface."
"I know."
Ash took the way that Clarke replied to her. It wasn't emotionally flat, but it was the way that Clarke said it. It led her to believe that there was more to it.
"Something happened with you and Nia in another life?" Ash questioned.
"Not me, per se, but my people. She sent you to distract us and sent basically a suicide bomber into the Mountain. My people were in there trying to scavenge things that we could use. Most of it was farm equipment. Raven and Monty had already disabled the remaining missile, but only a handful of people knew that it even existed. Nia harbored the last of the Mountain Men and sent one lone man from Azgeda to blow the Mountain. It collapsed in on itself, killing over a hundred of my people."
"Moba, Wanheda," Ash told her.
"It wasn't you, though, Ash. It was the Echo of another life. I can't blame you for it. You aren't the one that distracted us and helped cause issues in Polis. You never had that chance in this life. And, you've more than repented for what happened that life."
"I somehow doubt that," Ash replied.
"I have nothing to forgive you for, though, Ash. You've never hurt me. You saved me."
"I took you to Nia."
"Sha, you did, but in doing so, you realized what she was doing and helped me escape. You protected me when others would have tortured and killed me. You left your home to follow me. You took my blood because you believe in me. And, all I've done is survive some very things. I owe you, still."
"You owe me nothing," Ash stated.
"We'll see what you say after you meet young Madi. She is more than a handful. But, you might have better luck with her than I did. Maybe she won't try to kill you the first time she sees you," Clarke said.
"Well, I would expect nothing less from a child that has been hidden most of her life. Especially a grounder child, she at least would know how to hunt properly and somewhat defend herself. You act like she is an animal that needs to be tamed," Ash replied.
"Fine, but you get to tame her," Clarke stated. "And, I would be on the look out for bear traps."
"Bear traps?"
"Yes, she uses them in her 'defensive hunts'," Clarke added.
"Clever girl. I like her already," Ash replied. "But, I'm guessing from your warning that she caught you in one of her traps?"
"Oh, yes, she did."
"Clever, clever girl. She's smart. Good. She'll need that to survive."
Clarke side-eyed Ash, but she smiled. She knew that Ash was right. Madi's birth parents had taught her everything that they could to keep her alive and hidden from the Flame Keepers. She couldn't fault them for that. She'd done similar with her on her own. She wanted to protect her, and she was dead set on her not following in Lexa's footsteps to be heda. Clarke knew that Commanders didn't live long, and she'd mourned them both. She was determined to make sure that Madi survived.
"Is there something else?" Ash asked when Clarke had gone quiet.
"No," Clarke replied and gave a small smirk as she thought about her "daughter."
"Tell me more about her," Ash demanded.
"She has blue eyes like mine," Clarke stated. "But, there are some that compare her hair to that of Lexa's. It is a deep chestnut like hers, though. She likes to have it braided. She would show me these berries that made her naturally curly and wavy hair a little more manageable. She showed me how to preserve them so that we could use them year round. She really knew how to farm her little village, but it was more like we gathered everything we needed. She is a damn good fisher. She could stand on the riverbank with her little stick spear and just get fish after fish after fish. But, she loves to learn. She wants to know everything that she can. She would watch me as I would stitch either us up from getting cut. She learned what we could use for medicine that grew around the Valley. There isn't a lot of animals that are there, but we figure what we can hunt and eat."
"So, she taught you?" Ash quipped.
"Quite a lot."
"You told her a lot of stories though, didn't you?"
"I told her about the people that were close to me. She would tell me about the people in hers. It took me quite a while to convince her that it wasn't her fault that the Death Wave came. She was thankful though that I cleaned up the village. It was a hard thing and hard work, but I moved all the bodies from the village into one building. When I knew that they were all there, I burned it down. I'd found some lamp oil to start it. She told one night while we were camping outside the village. She realized then that I couldn't be a bad person, but she was still afraid to come out of hiding. It was days later that we first met. I had no idea that she was even there. She would come to the village at night and get some food and other things. She never started a fire. She hid because some part of her still thought that I was a Fleimkepa. She was still blaming herself for all their deaths, so she assumed that I was either there to kill her or take her. She wasn't going to go down without a fight. It didn't matter that I had cleaned up the village."
"Why did you do that, though?" Ash questioned.
"Clean up the village?"
"Sha," Ash replied.
"Bodies tend to decay and cause disease. Like I said, I didn't know that she was there. But, it was a village. It was surrounded by vegetation, clean water, some animals for protein, and shelter. The village had everything that I needed to live until the bunkers could be opened and my friends came back from space. I need to protect myself there. I had to get rid of the bodies. I knew that Grounders, the clans, believed the dead's souls were trapped unless they were burned. I knew that burning the bodies would protect me as well. I didn't have the strength to make pyre for them all. There were just too many, so I picked a house of the edge of the village and used it."
"You cleaned the house out first for supplies though, right?"
"Not a lot, but a little, yeah, I did," Clarke answered. "I felt weird doing it, but at the same time, I knew that I was just trying to survive. We recycled everything that we could on the ark. I'm talking wire, metal, clothes, boots. Surprisingly enough, my mom still has...had...my father's wedding ring. Those rings had been on our family for generations. It was the only reason that they were allowed to keep them. But, I knew it was only a matter of time before they'd take that from us. I didn't want to take anything that looked like it was personal. I owed them that much."
"And, the children?"
"I sent them into the afterlife with toys," Clarke stated. "I wanted them to have something of their own. I wanted them to not be afraid, you know?"
"And, you say your people aren't spiritual," Ash replied.
"Not in the way that you are, we aren't. But, I'll admit that there is always something there. Life itself is spiritual, I guess. I just didn't understand that until I came down here to Earth. Everything that I've done since landing, in all my lives, has been to survive. But, it is more than that," Clarke said.
"What do you mean?"
"It is like I'm being pushed to do things. Like there is some force out there, beyond my knowledge, leading me to do thing that I do. It is more than just my survival instinct kicking in, because let me tell you, I barely have one after living in the stars for seventeen years. Or rather, the one that I have isn't sufficient enough for the ground. Things are totally different down here than they are up there," Clarke added.
"I'm sure that it was," Ash replied.
They were quiet again. Ash wasn't sure that it was because she was giving Clarke the room to think about what she'd been through, or if it was more of the point that she was still wrestling with the fact that Clarke was being reborn to live this life over and over again. It was something else that Ash was still dealing with herself. She knew in her heart that Clarke was the rebirth of Wanheda. She could only wonder if that was the reason that she was reliving this life. She also wondered if it was actually true. She watched Clarke. It made her wonder why Keyron would choose her of all people to become Wanheda.
"I'm not trying to worry you or anything, but are we actually going to make it to Arkadia today?"
"Depends on if we find the burnt out forest today or not," Clarke answered.
Ash gave her a look but didn't ask anything more. She knew that Clarke was moving based on what she remembered from her former lives. The more that Clarke did since they came out of Becca's lab. She knew that Clarke had to know more than she was letting on, and it made her think. It made her wonder why she didn't tell Nia more about it. It made her wonder why she chose her out of everyone that was and had been close to her in these lives. Why was she the one that Clarke latched on to? Could it be that Clarke knew, somehow deep inside, that she was Wanheda? Or, was it just because Ash was someone familiar in a harsh and hazardous place like Azgeda? Ash let her hand fall to her stomach. The strange scar there was the mark of the element of Ice. If she the actual embodiment of Wanheda, did that make Ash one of the Twel? Was she the element of Ice?
Ash's contemplation ended quickly as she saw the burnt forest. She couldn't fathom the heat and the power that came through and destroyed the land. To see the tree trunks standing with no leaves. All the bark was burnt. Where there should have been leaf litter and undergrowth, there was nothing. Ash had never seen anything like this forest of ghosts as Clarke drove up to it.
"There's a storm coming."
"A storm?"
"A big one with a lot of sand and heat made glass," Clarke told her.
"We need to stop?"
"We need to stop and get the solar panels off and in the vehicle. I'm going to find a place for us to stop. It'll rain first before the sand storm comes. We should collect the rain," Clarke replied.
"You get the panels, and I'll set up the collection."
"Sounds like a plan," Clarke answered as she pulled up the Rover short. "We'll stop here for the night. Tomorrow, we'll get to Polis and then move on to Arkadia. This forest lets me know how close we are now."
"This is a landmark?"
"Yes, this is the forest about a half-day's ride by horse back from Polis."
"You're still wanting to go to Polis. What do you hope to find there, Clarke? It can't hold anything but ghosts," Ash stated.
"Yes, it is, but they are ghosts that I need to release," Clarke answered as she got out of the Rover.
Ash knew that the conversation was over. She watched as Clarke just grabbed the small amount of tools that they had. She knew that trying to get Clarke to say more about the ghosts that were still haunting her was going to be hard. She also knew that now wasn't the time. She crawled into the back and got the sleds out to gather the rain. She knew that this was going to be the freshest water that they would have until the Valley. And, they needed the water more than Ash needed to more ghosts to fight.
