NOVEL NEXT 148. The Abandonment of Creation
The day after the abandonment of creation they toiled up the enormous gouge. The earth was a gash, and a waste, and the eternal murk beclouded the face of the sky. They sought the gutters of deep gashes rent open by the errant moon. In their bottoms pooled gritty water as black as the burned hillsides about and they knelt like supplicants and puckered their lips to the earth to suck out what moisture they could. The sludgy dregs spat like mouthfuls of coagulated blood. Teeth tarblack as if rotting out of their living skulls. They had but a day or two of food. How far such a portion can be stretched, how thin an orc can get, he was about to find out.
The evening and the morning. The second day upcountry the gouge was divided in two: the left a gargantuan slab of flecked granite and the right a winding vein of quartz now laid bare to the sky, its violet obelisks jutting this way and that and shorn of their apexes as if in their apparent ordering the geometry of creation and of obliteration might be proofed. Shattered crystals sharded into the soles of their boots and that night he took care to double fold his blanket before laying upon it.
The evening and the morning. The sky gathered and loosed water upon the land. They filled their reservoirs and their bellies from the wide sheets that cascaded down the walls of the gouge. A floodway rose along the center of the mooncut and it was turbid with ash and dust, a muddy sediment deposited in washes and bars and ultimately in the sea of suns where in the days and years to come it would entomb the riven headsman's block still resting upon the seafloor. The bosun drank to forestall his hunger and he made a small sacrifice of tack to honor one god and then he ate it to honor another. In this manner he said all wouldbe saviors were satisfied.
The evening and the morning. A great hunger ruled the day and a lesser hunger ruled the night. Their last crumbs and seeds and desiccated fruits yielded to yearning gullets. Their food was gone. No fowl nor fish nor beast nor creeping thing to prey upon. Nothing but themselves, and Orc the hungriest, and the bosun the weakest of them.
The evening and the morning. The floodway now as dry as madlands sand. The earth gone warm underfoot and this seemed a blessing for they now were too starved to make much heat of their own accord. The earth got hotter and soon it was cleft by bottomless fumaroles that belched the stench of hell and the ground began to soften beneath their feet. It stuck to their leather soles and quivered in rippling waves at every step. Orc saw tracks running there. Two by two and baked into the very earth. Mym knelt over them. Someone was walking the gouge ahead of them.
"Dwarves?" said Orc.
"Men," she said.
The evening and the morning. They came upon the men. What was left of them. Wearing the garb of kingsmen, facedown and broiled upon the earth they'd sought to dominate. Orc toed one over. Face puffy and dark, skin loose from where it had blistered against the hot ground and now ready to slough off. Soon to dry into taught grins around white teeth and buglike eyeballs. The hair curled and burnt smelling. The other had a sack and the bosun was rifling through it. There was food there. Some tubers, some bread. Meat too, of a kind unidentifiable, and this they left for who could say whence it'd come. The bosun wanted to feast upon this paltry take. But Orc knew something of going hungry, of the fortitude needed to stretch food across the counted days, of veneering out a bulwark against the madness of famine. He collected the food from the bosun and stowed it away. He took the men's bedrolls too.
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The evening and the morning. The dwarf had taken to muttering as if the stones still listened. She addressed the mountains that had once stood overhead. The high passes she'd forced with Daraway some years before. When she said the woman's name she stopped talking. Orc pretended not to notice. Perhaps that was the wrong thing to do.
The evening and the morning. He woke to the sound of the bosun's gnashing. The musette flung open. The scavenged food gone. Stolen. Eaten. The bosun lay on his side with his knees drawn up and his arms crossed, rigorlike hands gripping opposite shoulders. He shivered and his eyes rolled. He was dead soon after. They had no way to burn his body. Days from any sea they threw it in a mudpot, stinking and sulphuric. Mym turned and went on while he watched the earth bubble up over him. It began to smell like the palatine grounds. It began to make his mouth water. He toiled on.
***
That night they huddled together as they had done in the days after the moonstrike. Under their blankets, her pack a shared pillow, her in his embrace. The ground was cold again and a freezing wind came up the gouge from seaward and fluttered their blankets on top of them. He pulled them closer. Arranged them around their feet. Tucked them under. A cocoon of warmth and hope and remembered beauty. In their minds the world beyond endured a metamorphosis to what had been. A coming dawn, a golden light, a radiance reaching inch by inch across the blankets. He settled in behind her.
"Why'd he follow ye?" she said.
"I don't know."
"Ye never asked him?"
"No. He tried to tell me once."
"Well. Ye aren't the best fer conversin."
"I think he felt he owed me something."
"How's that?"
"He felt I saved the lives of his boys and his wife."
"Who from?"
"Him."
"Did ye?"
"No. Not really."
He felt her adjust how she was laying. Her head under his chin. His nose halfburied in her hair. The earthy smell of it. He reached his arm around her, found her hand in his. Felt its hardness. Its seizing up. He wondered if she could even feel his grasp there.
"We never had enough of these," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"Moments. Lek this one."
"You mean before."
"Aye. Before."
He tilted his chin down. He kissed the top of her head. He heard her sharp inhalation. Her held breath. Then she began to weep.