Chapter Fourteen
Conflagration
Malcolm Reed
The days pass almost featurelessly here in the desert, counted off only on the seasonal changes of the life that inhabits it. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, and almost every day the march of the sun across the sky is identical and uninterrupted, though the sunset often plays a variation to close it. For a man born and raised under the perpetually changeful skies of England, the monotony is sometimes hard to bear.
But it's not only the boredom and constant effort of our lives here that's beginning to wear on me. If the 'uneventful' theme is sometimes dull after the 24/7 adrenaline-charged activity of life as the Head of Imperial Security, at least there's a sense of safety, of continuity in it; I no longer have to assess every waking moment for threats, though my awareness of them being 'out there' never really sleeps. I'm a fugitive from justice, and in the Empire there's no forgiving and forgetting. Even though the events of the world I once helped to control seem far distant from us now, they still go on, and the dangers haven't lost their teeth. I can easily imagine that the reward for my capture would contain an almost infinite number of zeros at the end, and Lucifer knows I never gave anyone any reason to think twice about delivering me to the hangman.
As for effort, well, Mother Nature doesn't give anything away for free, but there's food in plenty here if you know where to find it and I too have to master the tricks of living off the land. In my wolf identity I did exactly the same, but it was a completely different environment to this, and I had my brothers-in-fur to work with. If we didn't eat often, when we did, we ate well. In the desert, however, the prey tends to be smaller and harder to find – logical, when there are far fewer places to hide – and though there's more than enough to live on once you've worked out how, when you've three mouths to feed you have to catch three times as much prey. Though Grandmother barely seems to eat enough to keep a goose alive, Liz is adamant she has to have the food to eat if she chooses to. Many nights I end up finishing the leftovers if Liz doesn't want them, because my metabolic rate is so high I need a lot of food. Maybe that too is a souvenir of Wolfplanet Mindfuck, I've never been sure, but I can eat for England and never put on a gramme.
Of course, Liz and I learned early on that Grandmother is much more prosperous than she appears to be, and over the past several months, she has shown us that she can forage more than enough desert edibles in a single year to keep her going through two and still have some to sell or trade. So, I know we aren't going to go hungry if I fail to make a kill every time I go out, or even a few days in a row; but protein is essential and animal products are the only efficient and reliable source of it in the desert (not to mention the useful fur or feathers, bone and tendons a single animal carcass can provide). If nothing else, the chickens are always laying eggs, though there are far fewer of them in the driest months and some must be allowed to hatch to keep the flock going. Still, Liz and I have agreed that we have to leave Grandmother better off than when we found her, and part of that means not depleting her stores. So while I might not worry about a single failed hunting excursion, I take it as a personal failure every time I come back emptyhanded.
But my current problem isn't down to any of this.
True, now that we effectively have no use for a calendar, we're less aware of specific dates. But there's one date that's engraved on my mind, and every year as it approaches I get moody. When I had the power to make others suffer, I made sure I did. Anyone near me used to walk on tiptoe, because the slightest infraction would get them hours in an Agony Booth. And it was during one of those 'anniversaries' that a certain Ensign Cutler was appointed to Enterprise.
It wasn't on the day, luckily for her, or I might well have killed her. The poor bastard whose luck ran out on that particular date needed psychiatric treatment afterwards, and Phlox threatened to report me to Captain Forrest. The problem resolved itself when he took a one-way trip out of an airlock a month later, not that that bothered me particularly; I was far too far gone by then to care.
Since then, I've made excuses to myself not to interact with people very much around that time. I've even managed to control my moods, narrowing it down to about three days when my self-control becomes fragmentary. My lessons with Ginny gave me a number of extremely useful tips with regard to 'talking myself down' from the pitch of helpless raging for revenge that always seems to surface around then, though I never admitted to her that I still contain this festering sore I can neither heal nor completely ignore.
I thought what I planned – and did – to David Sallis would excise the grain of poison from it. When he died, that would be the last of those who had done those things to me. I watched the blood springing in the wake of that carefully angled blade, and imagined it carrying away the memories of a little boy who writhed and sobbed and screamed for his mother.
But it didn't work out quite like that. The flat calm that replaced the lust for revenge wasn't the peace I'd expected. The victory I'd worked so hard to achieve felt horribly like a defeat, and my complete inability to understand why left me savage with frustration.
Harry Rice was the only one who'd evaded me. My bloodhounds had him cornered, he was mine; he hadn't a prayer once I had my hands on him. By that time I was long past the messy, inelegant murder I'd carried out on Inspector Philip Hanley. Something far more sophisticated – far more lingering – awaited number four in my list.
The people who were eventually deemed to be responsible for allowing him to hurl himself out of a twelfth-floor window instead, baulking me of the opportunity to use him as the hors d'oeuvres for Sallis's appalling end, lived to regret their carelessness. Well, they lived, but let's say they weren't quite the same afterwards. Most ended up in labour camps – you have to have relatives willing and able to pay before you're allowed to be kept in an asylum. The Empire is unsentimental about keeping people locked up and unproductive when they can work for their existence (unless you're someone like Trip with valuable and unique skills and knowledge to be extracted from your mind, in which case you're usually far too busy being interrogated to actually be expected to perform manual labour). If one or two of them end up killing each other instead, well, that's a reduction of the food bill.
So Rice found his own way out, splattered on concrete at the foot of a block of offices, and I told myself that it was my failure to deal with all six as they deserved that had deprived me of closure.
But still, as the end of March came around every year and one particular date approached, my temper grew unpredictable. I couldn't cure myself and sometimes I couldn't control myself, and sometimes, if I'm honest, I didn't even try.
The end of winter in the Sonora is more like a fine spring in more temperate climates, tempting young couples in love to play truant from work or school and spend the day strolling hand-in-hand through the park. The midday temperature is starting to rise, and there will be days ahead in the baking heat of the foresummer drought, when work gets done at dawn and dusk, because nothing that doesn't want to be roasted to death moves out into the glare of the sun when it's high in the sky; but today – if I was of a mind to notice such things – is perfectly lovely.
It's a shower that has done the mischief. Now and again the capricious winds hurry a raincloud or two across the sky, and today is one of them. Or rather, a couple of days ago was one of them, and in one of the miracles that make the world a wonderful place if you're in the mood to appreciate it, the desert has sprung to life with wildflowers and blooming shrubs painting the landscape in a riot of brilliant hues any sunset would envy.
I've promised myself I won't look at my chronometer. It's not as if it matters what day it is, and if I don't know it won't kill me. But I have an acute memory, and a part of me doesn't need to check. I know what day it is, and what with one thing and another I know that all that molten pain and anger is boiling back up to the surface, unhealed, unreasoning, uncaring.
From the moment I open my eyes I feel the fragility of my defences. In the effort to bolster them I make use of every trick Ginny taught me, but I have the sensation of trying to rein in a tornado with a fence of twigs.
Still, as long as nothing triggers me, the twigs will hold. I'm confident of that – insofar as I'm confident of anything, with my nerves twitching and trembling with the urge to slaughter something. Harry Rice, the bastard, sailing through air to his sudden and grateful stop, spared the hours if not days of suffering at my hands; taking with him my only hope of peace, the last piece of the jigsaw that might have been my salvation.
Yes. With my reasoning mind I know that even if I had been able to secure him and 'complete the set' of my revenge, it really wouldn't have healed me properly because – once again – I'd have been hurting others rather than facing up to the pain and dealing with it. Even now I can access that idea. But the part of my mind that's still tied into the identity I fell into in Wolfplanet Mindfuck can't adapt it as part of reality. When I'm in the grip of this reversion it's as real and as useless as a stone when you're starving; you can see it, but you can't eat it.
I've tried to tell Liz something of this, though I doubt if she has any real idea of the turmoil I'm in. Even now, when Lucifer knows there's practically nothing of the worst of me she hasn't seen, I'm somehow ashamed of revealing that I have so little control of myself. I ought to be able to deal with this. I tell myself so every time another surge of black, sickening fury surges up in me, but it doesn't help; I have as little power over my feelings as a chap in a rowboat has over the Atlantic when a storm front rages up from the tropics.
Aware of the potential for trouble – why should Liz or Grandmother suffer for the demons I can't exorcise? – I take myself out hunting. The beauty of the flowers that have seized their opportunity is practically lost on me. On almost any other day I'd be staggered and uplifted, as I always am, by the acres of multi-coloured blossoms that have sprung out practically overnight, living their lives at massively accelerated speed so they can bloom and set seed before the cruel sun burns up the moisture in the ground and scorches them to a crisp. Today, ridiculously, it feels as if it's some particularly spiteful form of mockery on the part of the Universe. When I'm feeling at my lowest, tormented by the past I can neither forget nor forgive nor learn some way to deal with, how dare Mother Nature parade herself with this glorious, flamboyant burst of exuberance?
I should know – I do know – that agitation is a bad frame of mind for a hunter. As I set out, I go through some of the most effective of Ginny's magic tricks in the desperate attempt to calm myself. But staying indoors would be inviting disaster, and I know myself too well to risk it. With luck, achieving something positive will improve my temper. At the very least, it might partially appease the ugly craving to kill.
Many of the desert's inhabitants wisely come out during the hours of darkness, so I make a habit of setting snares in the late evening. There's always a chance that as the dawn brightens an opportunist early-rising buzzard or something will spot anything I've managed to catch that the owls, coyotes, foxes and other nocturnal predators haven't already found, so I set out almost before the first smudge of dawn appears on the eastern horizon.
Liz, alert as always for the shifts of my mood, is unusually anxious. I've done my level best to hide the fact of just how wretched I feel, but she knows me far too well by now, and she's more than acute enough to have realised by now that there's more to it than one of the bursts of anger that seize me when I think of what Trip Tucker must be enduring. I still haven't wholly forgiven him for choosing to buy our safety and that of everyone on Jupiter Station by handing himself over gift-wrapped with a pink ribbon and a gold bow to Admiral Fucking Hernandez, and the mere thought of what he's undoubtedly being made to suffer is enough to sour my mood all day.
Liz is off to the clinic today, so she'll be setting out shortly herself, though in a different direction. Once we got everything ship-shape and Bristol fashion, there was really very little for me to do there. So at first, I'd drop her off and then go hunting for the day, and then, after numerous trips without incident, she suggested that I needn't come with her every time. If they have any need for my skills, she can let me know and I'll go out in the next day or two. I hate the fact that she goes alone, even though I know in my heart of hearts that there's practically no danger of her being attacked; the desert communities are largely peaceful people, finding enough to do with grubbing a living from the land without wasting energy fighting one another. Co-operation is the key to existence out here. As for the undoubted dangers of the desert itself, she's awake to them and will take no risks.
There's no need to come with me to the door and she doesn't always, but as soon as I stand up to go, so does she. Standing on what might be termed the porch if your definition didn't have to be too exact, she slips her arms around me and lifts her face to press a kiss to my cheek – the fact that she doesn't aim for my mouth is telling in itself, and a part of me has the grace to feel thoroughly and deservedly ashamed of making her feel nervous of me. "Take care, sweetie," she says quietly.
I bite back the urge to snap, instead answering tersely that I'll see her this evening; and telling myself somewhat shamefacedly that I'll be extra nice when I do, to make up for being a spiteful bastard this morning, I set off towards the arroyo where I set my traps.
Three of them are empty. I approach the fourth just in time to hear the beat of wings, and a buzzard lifts off with the headless carcass of a big lizard clutched in its talons. It must have taken it an age, pulling and tugging at it till the wire sawed through the beast's neck.
"Drop it, you thieving bastard!" I yell, picking up a stone and hurling it. I hit it, too, but the blow's not hard enough to make it drop the lizard, and though it rocks in the air for a moment and its wing-beats are awkward as it gains height, it makes its escape.
Fucking, bollocking hell!
There's no point trudging to the snare; I already know what I'll find. But maybe the decapitated head may be some use as a lure elsewhere, so muttering resentfully to myself I go to the scene of the crime. Life in this environment teaches you to waste nothing, and there are edible creatures around here for which a lizard's severed head would make a tempting meal.
The place is a mess. The buzzard definitely had to work for its dinner, that much is evident from the broken branches of the shrub under which the snare was set. Leaves and twigs are scattered wholesale around the area where the wretched bird must have danced around, trying to pull its prey away from whatever was unaccountably holding it down.
The damage makes me angrier than ever. It was a decent spot, this, with a well-established run. Obviously when you come across a good place for trapping things you use it sparingly, so that the prey aren't scared off, but I'd come to rely on this one a bit when the others failed. As close to water as it is, it was a favoured route for small things sneaking down for a drink. In fairness, the lizard itself probably made a bit of a mess when it suddenly found itself strangling in a wire snare, but the more it struggled the closer and faster the loop would have tightened. It probably didn't thrash all that long.
I do what I can to repair the damage, but animals aren't stupid – it'll probably be a while and a while before there's any point laying a snare here again. The run has to look natural, it has to acquire a few little footprints and the right smell, and no amount of tweaking from me is going to recreate that.
So, still empty-handed and now in a rage with the buzzard as well as with the world in general, I brush off a couple of enterprising ants that are already investigating the lizard's severed head and put it into my keep-net. I could practically have predicted that one of the little fuckers would transfer itself onto my hand and bite me, doing it again before I can lift my hand up and smash it into a splodge. When I inspect the damage, the ant's mandibles are still twitching feebly, despite the fact that the force of the blow separated the insect into its component parts.
So much extraordinary, insatiable malice, contained in such a tiny body… I ought at least to feel a twinge of fellow-feeling.
March is the month when streams from the mountain meltwater flood down through the arroyos, creating pools where migratory geese often pause to rest. We've been short on fresh meat for days, though Grandmother has expressed no qualms about bringing out the occasional stringy smoked ham of a wild boar, pickled venison heart or summer sausage made from who knows what. Even without tapping into her stores, the plants and vegetables that are there for the knowledgeable to gather keep us reasonably well fed and we live far better than I'd ever have expected to if I thought about surviving in a desert. If I can salvage one scrap of good from this miserable day, at least with any luck I'll be able to provide us all with a decent dinner, with possibly even enough to keep for a second. The thought of filling my belly with good roast goose makes my mouth water.
There's a stand of reeds at one end of the place where a bulge in the rock walls allowed the seasonal river to widen out into a big, deep pool and deposit enough silt to allow vegetation to take hold. It's an ideal hiding place for migratory wildfowl and as I stealthily approach it I hear the small sounds that suggest something is moving about in there.
Using an energy weapon is for the direst emergencies only, because even though it's virtually silent – far safer in that regard than a projectile one, which can be heard for miles – I know there are satellites overhead that can pick up the discharge. There's no reason for anyone out here to own such a weapon, let alone use it, and curiosity is something we definitely do not want to provoke.
Back in the dim and distant days of my childhood, my passion for missiles and inability to acquire any led me to cultivate a certain talent with using a sling. I made the sling itself from a piece of linen I 'rescued' from an old pillowcase (the rest of it went into the dustbin, leaving Mother mightily perplexed by its disappearance) and the pebbles to use as shot could be picked up from any piece of waste ground. I made myself the terror of any local cats which chose to trespass on the garden, though I never used anything big enough to do any real damage – my already festering grudge against the human race didn't extend to their pets.
They say old habits die hard, and my muscle memory as regards this particular skill clearly hadn't faded in the intervening years. When I found myself in the desert I quickly made myself another sling from a piece of cured skin, and missiles were literally underfoot at every step. This time I wasn't aiming just to scare things off, but to bring them down, and it has to be said I found a great deal of satisfaction in being able to do it in a very short space of time.
So the sling is a fixture at my belt whenever I go out, and I automatically collect a few stones before I've gone more than a couple of metres from the cabin. The sling slips into my hand now with the ease of familiarity, and I grope in my pocket for the stone to settle into the worn cup at the base of it that will hold it steady till it goes airborne. It's a pity I wasn't prepared when that bloody buzzard went up, or I might well have got that, especially given it was slowed down by the weight of its stolen dinner.
The sling poised ready, I creep closer, my pulse racing, my whole world narrowed down to pinpointing the source of those small sounds. It could be a foraging pack-rat or even a rabbit taking refuge in there when it saw or heard me approach, but I'm expecting the sudden explosive beat of a goose's wings, and it happens.
Before the bird's cleared the reeds my sling is whirling. As it gains height I let fly, and next moment I give an almost animal scream of triumph when the goose drops from the air – and falls straight into the middle of the water.
It's not dead. I think I broke one of its wings, because it floats there flapping helplessly, honking in distress. It can't get away from me now – all I have to do is swim out there and get hold of it.
Swim out there and get hold of it.
Loosing a steady stream of invective, I strip off. Then, bollock-naked, I feel my way down the rocks into the water's edge. Though it's a pleasantly mild day when fully clothed, the light breeze is enough to give my naked flesh a chill, particularly now I've broken into a cold sweat at the thought of going into the water. Meanwhile, I just have to ignore the discomfort of sharp edges of rock under my bare feet.
The water is surprisingly cold, but most of the pool is under a steep overhang, which keeps it cool and slows evaporation. It's not unpleasant, given the lovely warm day, though it's a shock to the body at first; but the sides fall steeply, and the clarity of the water shows me it's deep – though water depth is often hard to estimate correctly.
The Empire's officer recruitment tests include a mandatory swimming test. The fact is that if I'd taken it, I'd have failed it. It's an extremely well-hidden fact that I suffer from aquaphobia, have done ever since one of my egregious infant playmates in a paddling pool took advantage of my small size to experiment with how long a two-year-old could be held face down in water before he stopped struggling. Fortunately for me, a competent lifeguard managed to get me breathing again on that occasion, but the terror of the experience stayed with me for life; I managed somehow to master the technique of swimming, but could never have achieved the skill required by the test. Luckily, the officials responsible for these were open to bribery, and so my file was marked 'Passed' without my having to do more than dunk myself in the water so it wasn't obvious to anyone in the changing room that I'd cheated my way past it. I suppose it goes without saying that shortly afterwards the officials were taken up by the BII on completely unrelated charges and died in custody.
All these years I've managed somehow to evade the necessity for going any more than thigh-deep in water. But though the pool is narrow, it's easily more than chest-deep in the middle. Even if I managed to get out there without it going past my chin, balancing precariously on the rocks that make up the bottom, I'd only have to slip off one and I'd be up shit creek without a paddle.
I manage to negotiate a way down till I'm just under waist deep, though each step takes me an agony of hesitation and fear and the cold water makes my bollocks try to crawl back up inside me when I reach the appropriate depth. The damn goose isn't so far away – five metres, perhaps – but it might as well be five kilometres; and as ill-luck would have it, or maybe it sees me and understands exactly what awaits it if I get hold of it, its flapping and thrashing is carrying it towards the other side of the pool. This is essentially a small cliff, the side of the arroyo, and short of professional climbing gear there's no way I could get across that without falling off and into the water.
My heart is kicking in my chest, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth with terror, and over and over again I tell myself that I can swim, that this is nothing like the fucking test, where I had to actually dive to retrieve something from the bottom of the pool. Despite my aquaphobia, I could swim a short distance when I was a teenager – a simple crawl stroke, possibly enough to save me if I fell into a canal or something; as long as I managed to keep my face mostly clear of the water I could fend off panic, though I never actually tried it in water deeper than I could stand upright in. So memory tells me I can do this, that it's just a matter of launching myself off and splashing a couple of metres and grabbing the damn goose before it can go any further. But it's still alive and I doubt if it'll come quietly, and the thought of having to do anything else – like hit it with a stone or grab its neck and twist – while I'm trying to tread water literally turns my knees to jelly. It's not just a matter of kicking off and keeping going, like it was in the swimming baths; it's having to do something else while I entrust myself to the water waiting to suck me down into the depths and drown me. Obviously I could get hold of it and just tow it while it's still alive, but towing it at all would immobilise one arm, and towing it while it's still got capability of attacking me when I'm trying not to drown is enough to give me the horrors. And every moment the goose is floating slowly further away.
I try. Two or three times I tense up, willing my knees to bend and my feet to push off, launching me forward. But my body quite literally refuses to listen, and my hands, rather than reaching forward to cleave the water and reduce its resistance, simply flail at it as though trying to push it away.
There has to be another way. Fuck knows there are enough stones around here, and if I land them near the goose they should create waves, pushing it towards me. I've more than enough strength for that, and patience too. So with a shudder of relief – and rage at my own stupid cowardice – I pick a way back out of the water.
I get dressed again and with a bit of difficulty make my way to the spot on the poolside that's nearest to the now rather less lively goose. On the way I pick up a few hefty stones and, as soon as I'm in position, I start throwing them. My aim's not bad, though I wince a bit when one or two hit the bird rather than the water, but progress is agonisingly slow; there seems to be a bit of a wind against me, pushing against the wretched goose as if it were a sail.
I keep trying. Stone after stone, achieving nothing much; just as I manage to get it a metre or so closer – close enough and I could break off a branch from somewhere, or even lean out and use my trousers to whack it within grabbing range – the breeze playfully pushes it out again.
Finally, my arm aching from the unaccustomed, repeated exertion on a specific set of muscles that aren't used to it, I decide sterner measures are required. Fist-sized stones aren't getting me anywhere; I need something that will create a lot more of a splash. Hopefully just one will do the trick, if I can just find the right one to use.
It takes me a bit of searching. And when I find it, I know that I'm going to be taking a risk. It's big enough that it's going to take me an effort to lob, and if I'm not careful I'll go in after it.
But after weighing up the options, I realise that even if I do go in, I won't go very far. I'll still be close enough to splash my way to the side and climb out again, and hopefully I might even be able to make a grab for that fucking goose, which will surely have been washed halfway to the shore by the wave this damn thing will create. It's bigger than a dinner-plate, but luckily not very thick, which is why I'm able to lift it and even contemplate throwing it. I'm no geologist, but I reckon it must be some kind of highly fissile rock like slate.
Very hot and tired by now, I lug my prize back to the poolside. The poor bastard in the middle must be dead or exhausted; it's just floating there, a sad lump of feathers with one wing outspread.
I reach my launch point again. Very, very carefully I ready myself, the rock positioned in my hands to make the absolute maximum use of whatever lift the air may give it as it hurtles horizontally. It's far too big to be thrown like a Frisbee or even a discus; I need two hands, which will make me dangerously unbalanced as I let go, but I've run out of options. I'll give myself half a rotation to lend it velocity – I can afford that much, with luck.
I ready myself, breathe a few times. Then, before I can think about that water waiting in front of me, I launch myself into action. With all the strength of my body behind it, the stone sails out across the surface of the pool.
I've committed myself too hard. I can't stop, and I fly headlong. The water receives me, and the shock of it drives out what little breath I have left; for a moment I'm too consumed with panic to even realise that I hit my right leg off an underwater rock as I flail around. But my old knowledge saves me, and it's only seconds before I manage to get back to the surface and see safety only the shortest of distances away. Just a couple of overarm strokes and I'm there, sobbing with relief and adrenaline as I claw my way up onto dry land again.
I'm so shaken that for a minute all I can do is crouch there, shaking and spitting water out of my mouth and nose. But I did it – I must surely have got that blasted goose with that! – and I force myself back to my feet, turning to see how close it is now. With a rock that size hitting the surface beside it, it's not out of the question for it to have been washed up out of the water altogether, though given my luck today I'm not banking on that. I may have to wade in a bit, or find some way to slash it close enough, but it definitely must be a lot closer than it was.
Only agitated, slowly-settling water meets my astonished gaze.
What the fuck–?
I actually look up, half-expecting some incredible turn of events to have allowed the goose to take off and fly with one wing, launched off the water by the splash. But an empty slice of painfully bright sky greets me, so I look down again, completely dumbfounded to know where the bird has gone.
It hasn't gone. Or at least, it has – downwards. The stone must have landed straight on top of it, and bore it down to the bottom of the pool. You'd think it was impossible, all that unstable, buoyant weight trapped by an uneven chunk of rock; you'd think that at some point during its journey down, the drag would have torn it free.
I think partially it did. Peering desperately down into the depths, I make out what looks like a wing, pointing forlornly skywards. But some other part of it was trapped when the rock hit bottom, and there it's going to stay.
If you had to find a plus in the situation, I suppose the goose is now finally out of its suffering. But I've had success torn from my grasp, I'm hungry, I'm tired, I'm soaked to the skin, I've been frightened shitless, and I've FUCK ALL TO SHOW FOR IT. And if that wasn't enough, I now have leisure to realise that I've smacked my right shin off something – it must have been when I fell into the water, because if I'd been in this much pain beforehand I could never have launched the stone like that – and I have blood soaking into my trouser leg, spreading downward in an ominous stain.
There's enough daylight left for me to keep going, keep trying to catch something. But I need to have the wound cleaned and treated, and to be absolutely honest I'm too exhausted and defeated to think of trying to carry on. I already have a long, painful walk home to look forward to, which would be just as long and painful if I had more than a lizard's head in my keep-net, but at least having something to contribute to the pot when I get there would help to soothe my burning sense of failure.
After dipping up enough water from the lake to tip down my throat, trying without success to wash down the bitter taste of failure as I bolster my body against the long walk home, I gather up everything I'd set down and start the trudge back towards the cabin. The injury to my leg throbs and stings with every step, while the way seems to be composed largely of trip hazards – the last thing I can afford right now is to fall and hurt myself worse, though more than once I catch my foot when my leg doesn't respond as it should, sending me reeling forward, desperately flailing to stay upright. I manage, but only just, and by the time I finally reach the slope up to the cabin I'm almost weeping with pain and fury and disappointment at myself.
Ordinarily, the gradient is nothing. Even the path is pretty well clear, though it meanders a bit to keep it from being noticeable among the boulders and scrub. Just a few more minutes and I'll be able to sit down and get these trousers off and see what the damage is, and Liz will have some painkillers and make a fuss of me when she gets home. At a guess she'll have had a better day than I have – I'm sure at least a few people will be better off for her efforts, so she will have accomplished something.
Lucifer, I'm pathetic!
But pathetic or no, I've got to get home. I filled my waterskin before I left the pool, so I can use some of it to flush the wound out and Grandmother will have some home-made remedy to smear on it in the meantime. Bolstered a bit by the prospect of rest, shade and help, I heave a sigh and confront what suddenly seems to have become an ascent of Alpine proportions.
I manage it without accident, even though by the time I get to the top it's as much as I can do to bear down on my right leg to push up another step. Gratefully I reach the great slab of flat rock on which the cabin is partially built, and prepare to hobble the last few metres of the way. The door's open, I can practically taste Grandmother's herbal tea, and I'm so thankful to be done with the struggle that I actually have tears pricking at my eyes.
But just as I'm level with the straggle of bushes that cling somehow to life in the lee of the cabin wall, there's a sudden movement in them and Beans darts out, a fat pack-rat dangling from her jaws. With a prook of delighted welcome she heads straight for my legs, and I'm too tired and clumsy to adjust my step to avoid her. I tread on her paw, she yowls in pain, I try to dance sideways and my hurt leg buckles, and as I stagger, unforgivably, I lash out.
I kick at Beans.
The God in which I've always denied belief ensures my boot connects with a slew of gravel, and the contact slows it so though the gravel sprays over the cat, my foot doesn't connect. But it's enough to scare the poor beast, and even as she springs away, the loudest voice I've heard since I came here bellows, "MALCOLM!"
The fragile mental twigs of restraint which have been straining all day to hold back my stormy emotions are borne away into a nowhere in which existence itself is forgotten. Pure panic joins the roiling mix of anger, grief, frustration, humiliation, and things I can't even name, and with a stab of lightning and a roar of thunder, the storm inside me breaks. She knows your name! an appalled voice inside my head screams. She knows you! And somehow, this translates itself into She knows everything!
That can't be allowed. Shrieking curses, I scramble back to my feet, tearing the ivory knife from my boot. I want to rend, I want to kill; I want the world to be blood.
Grandmother faces me, unarmed but for a worn old wooden spoon that she stirs her medicines with. She's so old she hardly comes up to my shoulder and so frail I could deck her with one push, but suddenly her strength is so real and so manifest to me that she feels like a wall of ice against which my little flame beats without so much as melting a drop of water from it.
Unquenchable meets immovable. But slowly, slowly, she beats me down and bears me back, and the howling of the demons inside me sinks to whimpers and thence to silence, while the two of us stand motionless, facing one another.
After an aeon has passed, the knife drops from my fingers, unneeded, unheeded. Dropping my net, I cover my face with my hands and sob while the hot tears course between my filthy fingers.
I've lied and blackmailed and raped, I've murdered and maimed and broken minds, and still dared to believe there was some escape possible. And now it's boiled down to this, and this is what it takes to show me the monster I am and always will be: I tried to kick Beans.
"Child." The voice is gentler now. "Come inside. Come on in. Ain't nothing going to hurt you here."
Hurt me? Why should anyone care what hurts me, or how, or why? I thought I could escape Hell, but it's inside me. I am Hell. I made myself into it, stone by stone, building the walls, blocking the escape routes; and here I am, trapped with the stink of myself for eternity, or at least until someone has enough pity to put an end to me. Liz had the right idea after all, with that deft manoeuvre with the fish knife; if Lucas had had half a clue what he was really dealing with, he'd have spared himself the trouble and the world the horror of my continued existence.
There's a hand on my shoulder. I no longer have enough will to resist, or to think at all. I am paralysed by the revelation of myself.
Blind, witless, I let myself be steered inside. The tapping of a cup at my lips orders me to drink, so I drain it.
And then the taste carries me away into darkness, and as light slips away from me I pray it will never come back.
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