NOVEL NEXT 126. What Had Been
There was a lake across the vale from the delving where her ma and da used to take her in the summers of her lasshood. She sat on a granite boulder with her toes in the frigid cerulean water while her ma climbed up to consult the seraced glacier and her da conversed with the stones. His white shocked beard bannering out from the wind. His shard of the sky. Him gesturing it at the mountaintop as if the stones could see while he made some explanation of his wife's swollen belly. He turned toward Mym, calmed his beard with his hand, smiling at her as he stonespoke. Black alder stood dense along the shoreline in a bank aflutter with ptarmigan and finch. The air a concert of birdsong, high and joyous, the scions of communities far older than the dwarves. Mym sat on her boulder and with a graphite shard sketched what she saw upon paper traded up from someplace beyond the sea of suns. Her ma now too high to see. Her da hopped from rock to rock and he wandered far out upon the old moraine making his greetings and good tidings while Mym sketched on. An eagle hunting the lake. Trout coppered by sunlight. She left her boots on the boulder and walked in barefoot among the trees. Bare trunks to a certain height then exploding overhead in chattering colors. She walked from trunk to trunk studying the understory, strokes sweeping the paper, a second graphite sticking out of her breast pocket. She stopped at a rough circle of sunlight centered upon a stump and she looked it over. A stone clung between its old roots. She asked what had happened and she was delighted to hear a reply though she couldn't yet understand its meaning. She squatted and drew what she saw. The light and the shadows. She made the lines slowly but they weren't quite right. By then the shadows were shifting east. Just the scrape of the graphite on the paper. The granularity of it. So many birds up in the branches. Her da's rumbling somewhere. This the last hour before she became the lastborn. An hour to turn the world upon.
***
She woke to the sound of distant voices. She sat up and listened. The coals beside her breathed in the wind. Nothing to hear but the settling surf. She didn't sleep again that night.
In the days to follow they walked south between the calming sea and the outer rim of the madlands in the shadow of the late world. Thirsty and ragged. The cliff unyielding. Rockfall clacking. They lived on great quantities of white and blue fish that had been parboiled by the energy of the moonstrike and were thereafter deposited onto the strand in heaps. A mass of scales and flesh. Buttonhole eyes staring at the sky. At the banks of the Mad they drank themselves sick. Their bellies and waterskin and canteen overflowing. They saw no evidence of any chinook in its opaque and silted estuary. Beyond the river they stood and looked down the strand where a fine dusting of ash covered all the land for as far as they could see, the shadowless shapes of the hoodoos standing out of the cliffs and the fish kills shoaled up at the lethargic waterline. Meridian to the unseen sun.
What did it mean to be lastborn? Was it any different from last alive?
Two days past the Mad they found the Stranger. Its prow wedged a hundred yards up between two hoodoos, its foremast snapped and hanging offboard in its shrouds like a leviathan chained up by its flukes. No colorful hails thence, no sounds of any kind. They trudged underneath thinking they might find something useful dropped into the sand, but there was nothing that hadn't been swept away. Of the aft section there was no sign at all. They may have salvaged something from the foredeck, some water or food, a jacket and a boot for Orc, but the climb was treacherous. Impossible. They went on. The strand now bereft of wood so no fires to push back the night, to warm the freezing orc. The wet sand itself a kind of iceglass. The wind, the ground, the water all deadly cold. She covered him shivering every night and she made him hold her underneath her furs.
She lay in the blankets watching the murk of the sky settle around them. The sourceless darkness deepening all about, coagulating in the absence of hope. She straightened the blankets about them and she lay awake watching. If the sun didn't come back nothing would grow. If the sun didn't come back every surviving thing would die.
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In the nights she woke to a gnawing at her stomach, a creaking of her heart. A thirst that hurt her throat just by breathing. It drove her from their bivouac. Standing up in the inkpot night clutching her chest and hearing the whisper of the waves. She ambled before them breathing that cold arenitic air with her eyes wide open but there was nothing to see. The sudden icy sop over her toes and the light casting of sand upon them. When the last wave slid up the beach would it slide down again? An old paradox. To come to a final rest. No action but anteceded by reaction. She shuffled further into the sea, feeling it rise over her ankles, her knees. Arms straight down, fingers reaching. A rest from what? The thing that moves all life: instinct or hunger. To which she and the orc were captive. Like the lion culling the sick from the herd of which men say it knows nothing yet given equal choice between the sick and the young always the sick are the first predated. She lifted her saltwatered fingers to her bitter mouth.
It took six days to cross the sandblasted shoreland. The path of the drainage she knew ran up and over the plateau and down to Here First. She didn't know what they would find there.
"It's raining," said Orc.
She looked up. Held out her hand. An uneven pattering of thin drops. She unrolled her pack and set out everything, everything exposed to the sky. They uncapped the canteen and the waterskin and left them out. They lay on their backs with their mouths open. They might freeze overnight in their damp clothes and blankets but they would not die of thirst.
Orc stood up suddenly and began to walk down the beach picking through the pebbles and seaglass and broken shells and he came back with the halfshells of several mollusks. These he arranged as catchments around them and when she saw what he was doing she went to help. When the rain quit they picked up each and poured them into the waterskin. She collected up the blankets and he held the canteen as she wrung them inch by inch into it. Altogether enough for three or four swallows each.
Before they left the shore they went down to the water and searched for crustaceans boiled in their shells. They ignored the mounded fish kill for the dead fish had long since begun to stink. When they finally began up the drainage they had enough food for several days and as they climbed they watched the smooth sandstone for puddled rainwater and they crawled on their bellies and drank from these. They sucked up any excess and spat it into their vessels for later. Then it began to rain again. Gray drops come out of nothing, spattering on the ashen rocks, dripping down in dirty beads. The drainage began to run in places. They filled up everything they could carry. She saw no animals partake of the water. No birds, no insects. But this had been a barren land even before the impact.
They were very cold that night. Orc tore some pages from the brigadier's journal and she tried to light them but they were too wet to catch a spark. They huddled under the nakwool blankets and did not sleep at all.
In the morning they topped the plateau. A desolate wilderness. The old wagon roadcut across it, parallel ruts with bottoms still reflecting up the sky from the rain. A spokeblown handcart by the wayside, overturned. A bundle of rags. Farther on there were bodies. Facedown in a rut. Three of them, two small, one large. The one holding the other two against her. All of them swollen within their clothes, their skin dark and getting darker. This the first sign that they had not somehow passed into some parallel creation absent of folk, some parallel hell. Mym crouched there and asked the stones what had happened yet their reply was incomprehensible, as if the insurgent seawater had the power to wash away all memory of what had come before. She touched her fingertips to her lips.
"What happened," said Orc.
She shook her head.
"They're still not talking to you?"
"Aye they're talkin. It's all nonsense."
With a blanket draped over his unclothed torso he moved to where the bodies lay. He put his hand over his nose and he bent as if to despoil them. All he took was a shoe. He pulled it off by the heel and he carried it over to where Mym waited. He punctured the toe leather with Booky's blade and made a slit there. He made another at the ankle above the tongue. Even with these his foot barely fit, the toes poking out the front and hanging over the sole.
"Ye might take the shirt too," she said.
"It'd never fit and it's linen besides."
"The sun come out ye might want it."
"The sun's not coming out."
"It might."
He shook his head. "Let's go."