The Fire Sermon (17 page)

There was no way out, though. From every house, it seemed, figures had burst, and the edges of the green were ringed with lanterns and torches. The horses wheeled, backing into one another and skittering in panic. Kip was struggling to free himself of the sheet without releasing his grip on the horse’s mane. The ring of flames tightened around us. A man with a torch darted close. He grabbed at my leg, his grip on my ankle a shackle that kicking could not shake. The heat from his torch scorched my knee.

Then he was enveloped in the sheet that Kip tossed at him. I kicked out at the grasping shroud of fabric, already aflame. My horse responded as if to a signal, and took off. As I careened toward the torches, the figures holding them were only black outlines, but I saw them loom closer, and then, at the last minute, dive aside, a blur of flame. Behind me, loud as my galloping heartbeat, I could hear the other horse.

I didn’t dare to turn and check whether Kip was still mounted, could only shout his name. When he replied, over the pounding of hooves, I heard my body answer, a sound that was part sob, part laugh.

chapter 12

In those first minutes of frantic galloping, I was afraid that we’d never be able to stop. We soon learned, however, that the horses were fundamentally lazy. After the initial panic had receded, and the lights of the village were no longer visible behind us, the horses slowed, and it was only with repeated kicks that they could be persuaded to move at anything faster than a walk. We rode most of the night in this fashion: bursts of reluctant speed, long periods of walking. I hadn’t imagined how tiring it would be. I’d thought riding would be as simple as sitting, but the effort of just staying on, let alone cajoling the horse forward, made my hips and legs ache. My horse kept stopping to graze and could only be dissuaded by sharp upward tugs on the rope around its neck. When I coaxed it to a faster pace, I was bounced around until I thought my teeth would loosen and fall out.

I knew, or sensed, that we were still heading southwest, though we’d left the road not long after the village. As the morning began to seep through the darkness, we saw that we’d reached a broad plain, disturbed only by tussocks of longer grass and small ponds. The horses slowed as they picked their way through the swampy ground. For once I didn’t struggle against my horse as it began tearing grass from the soggy earth. Kip drew to a halt beside me and surveyed the flat expanse around us. “If we get off here, we’ll never be able to get back on again.”

“I’ve got a feeling it’s easier without an angry mob,” I said. “Either way, I don’t think I can stay up much longer.”

“Do you know how to get down?”

I shrugged. “Surely that’s the easy bit. I’ve been struggling all night not to fall off.” I could make out a small coppice only a few hundred feet away. “We could sleep there.”

“Right now, I could sleep anywhere.”

I swung one leg over to join the other and slid down, stumbling slightly when I landed. My legs protested as I straightened them. Next to me, the horse shook his neck happily. Kip dismounted, too, landing evenly but wincing at his muscles’ ache.

The horses took some convincing to move again, but after much tugging they swayed back into grudging motion, and before too long we reached the shelter of the small stand of trees. The horses drank from the swampy pond while I tethered their ropes to a branch. Within the huddle of the trees, where the ground rose slightly from the swamp plain, Kip sat on the tufted grass. He gestured to himself with distaste. “I finally get hold of some clothes, lovely clean clothes, and now they reek of horse.”

“I can’t imagine we smell too great ourselves, these days,” I said. Sitting beside him, I fished out the last two apples from my pockets, passed one to him.

“How far do you think we’ve come?”

“A long way. Further than we would have made in days on foot, I think.” I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep the horses all the way to the coast—Omegas on horseback would always be conspicuous—but every day of riding brought us closer to the island.

He spat out an apple pip. “Far enough that Zach’ll stop looking for us?”

I shook my head. “It’s not just him, anyway.” All through the night, even with the horse jolting beneath me, I’d felt the Confessor, felt that beam of thought trained on us. “Not that I think he’ll ever stop looking, but it’s her I feel, mainly. The Confessor. And I don’t know why she’d care so much. Why she’d be so concerned about protecting Zach.”

Beside me, Kip lay back. “She works for him, right?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I mean, she’s an Omega, and he’s on the Council, so yes. But it’s hard to picture her working for anyone, really.” I thought of the imperious arch of the Confessor’s eyebrows.

Kip sat up. “I forgot—this is yours.” He took off the outer sweater, and then, beneath it, peeled off the sweater I’d lent him that first day. I put it over my shirt. It was filthy, and weirdly misshapen at the neck, from being stretched around his waist for these weeks. I looked down at myself and laughed.

“Sorry,” he said, pulling on his own sweater again. “I guess I ruined it.”

“My clothes are the least of our worries at the moment, however ridiculous I look.”

“You don’t look ridiculous. You look beautiful.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t know what to say, but he was already rolling over to sleep. “Filthy, obviously. And you smell of horse. But beautiful.”

The horses were a mixed blessing. We could cover ground more quickly than before, but we also felt exposed. Two people on horseback were easier to spot and harder to hide, and two Omegas on horseback would draw attention from anyone we passed, not just the Council’s soldiers. We agreed to keep the horses only for a few days, to cross the marshy plain, then ditch them when we started to encounter habitable land.

The riding got easier. I figured out that my horse responded better to squeezes from my legs than tugs on the rope around its neck. Mounting was still hard for Kip, with only one arm to haul himself up, but he took quickly to the riding. The unsteadiness that still plagued his movements was lessened on horseback, and he would show off, circling me, shifting smoothly between paces. We made good progress, drawn on always by the enticing sense that we were closer each day to the island. My visions of it were clearer than before, as though it were emerging from the fog of distance. When it came to me in dreams, I could see the black gloss of the mussels clinging to the rocks at the water’s edge, and smell the salt-scoured air, soured with bird droppings.

My legs still ached from the riding, but I’d grown fond of my horse and often, in the evenings, would stand leaning against its neck, one hand on its shoulder, the other on the soft notch of its nose, between the huge, flaring nostrils. Despite my protestations, Kip could never quite rid himself of the idea that I was communicating psychically with the horses. In fact, it was the opposite that I warmed to, and that I’d found so disarming at first: the horses were so insistently present, in their sheer size and physicality, but not present in the sense that I was used to, that throbbing mental awareness that I felt around other people. When I stood with my face pressed to my horse’s neck, I could close my eyes and imagine this might be what a nonseer would feel when with another person. A simple presence, a warm body. At night, when I slept close to Kip, I wondered if his lack of memories explained why I was able to feel so comfortable with him. Perhaps his mind felt so unobtrusive to mine because his lack of a past meant there was less clamor in his head.

He didn’t talk often about what had happened to him, but I was surprised at how happy he seemed. The world appeared to hold a kind of novelty for him, and despite the hunger and exhaustion, he was largely cheerful. He tried to explain it to me, one night when we lay huddled close on the grass, the horses tethered nearby.

“When you broke the tank, it was like the blast. That’s what it feels like. Not in a bad way, but in the way that everything split, right at that moment, into Before and After. The instant when you smashed the glass. That was the blast, for me, right down to the noise, rushing in. The crashing.”

I winced as I remembered it. The swing of the wrench; the explosion of sound in the tank room’s hush.

He continued: “Everything before then, it’s lost to me. Of course it’s sad. And of course I wish I knew. But everything since the smashing of the tank, that’s the After. And I can’t argue with it. It’s what I’ve got. It’s hard to explain, but it’s exciting, in a way. Everything’s new.”

I sighed. “I could do with a little less excitement, myself.” But I knew what he meant. I also knew the responsibility that I had toward him. I was the tank smasher, the blast maker. I wasn’t sure whether I was the apocalypse of his old world, or the prophet of his new world. Or both. Either way, I knew already that we were bound together, since the moment I swung the wrench into the tank. Perhaps from before then: from the moment his eyes met mine through the glass.

We passed only one settlement in the marshlands. We saw the hill from a distance, emerging from the swamp, the outline of buildings at its peak, its lower slopes planted with straggling crops. Its forsaken position marked it as an Omega settlement, but we nonetheless skirted widely as the sun set. There were no copses within sight, but half a mile west of the settlement we came across a patch where the reeds towered above the horses, giving good cover, so we stopped there for the night.

We’d planned to keep our distance and head off before dawn, but the music drew us in. As we were tethering the horses the sound of the pipes came slinking across the marsh. When the wind was low enough we could make out the twang of a guitar as well. It was the first time I’d heard music since my years in the settlement, where Sara the blacksmith used to play the pipes when we’d gather together after harvest, or for the midwinter bonfire. Omega bards, too, passed through our settlement sometimes, though in the last lean years few bards would stop there, when there were no coins to be given and the best they could hope for was a bed for the night and a meager meal. On the marsh with Kip that evening, it had been so long since I’d heard music that the sounds reaching us seemed not just to come out of the darkness but also to come out of the past. Melodies half-heard and half-remembered.

The moon was slim, so it was hard work to pick our way through the marsh to the settlement, and several times one or both of us ended up knee-deep in water. Hunger had put an end to any qualms about stealing from Omegas, but as we drew closer, the ramshackle buildings and the fetid smell of the sodden fields surrounding them suggested there’d be little to steal. But it was the music that I wanted to take. We crept through the patchy fields until the buildings began. The noise was coming from the barn on the south side of the hill. It was brightly lit by hanging lanterns, and through the open door we could see figures, some seated on hay bales, others dancing to the tune.

Since this was an Omega settlement, at least we knew that there would be no dogs to reveal us as we crept around to the back of the barn. The music was loud there, and the rough beamed wall was generous with cracks through which we could peer inside. The lanterns seemed to flicker in time with the music. In the center of the barn, on a makeshift stage of hay bales, two men played pipes while a woman played a guitar. They were traveling bards, by the look of them, their clothes both ornate and road-worn. Their visit was probably an excuse for this threadbare party. Around them milled the locals, thin but merry enough, and some of them drunk already, reeling to the music.

“Come away,” said Kip, pulling at my elbow.

“They won’t be able to see us—not with the barn lit up like that,” I whispered, keeping my face pressed to the rough wood. Inside, a man was spinning a young girl by her arms, her single foot lifting from the ground as she orbited him, laughing loudly.

“It’s not that.”

I turned. He stepped back, gave a half bow, and held out his arm again.

“Dance?”

I stifled a laugh at the absurdity of it. But he met my grin with one of his own. “Just for a few minutes, let’s pretend we’re not fugitives. Let’s just be two people at a dance.”

He must have known, as much as I did, how impossible it was. At any minute we could be exposed. Even here, among our own kind, we dared not show ourselves. Word might have spread from Wyndham, if not from the village where we’d stolen the horses. There were soldiers after us, and a bounty, probably, which the bony faces inside the barn would find hard to resist. And somewhere the Confessor was out there, too, her blade-mind rasping the night sky.

In the dark, though, with the music leaking through the gaps in the barn wall, and with the smell of smoke and ale, it was easy just to take his hand. The light from the barn painted bars on his face. Taking his arm, I rested my other hand on his side, and we swayed to the music. For a few moments, it was like a glimpse into another life: one in which we might be inside the barn, dancing with friends, instead of hiding outside in the dark. One in which our worries might be a poor harvest, or a leaky roof, instead of a chamber full of tanks, and a pursuing army. Where my sleep might be interrupted by dreams of a handsome boy I’d seen at market, instead of by visions of the blast.