White and Other Tales of Ruin (16 page)

But Jade seems to know.

“
There are lots of reasons,” she says. “Population control, for one. At least half of those you see are children. The others are men and women of a ... breeding age. No old people. No ill people.”

“
But it’s just so misguided. So
wrong
. How can anyone think this can help?”

Jade is silent for a moment. She seems to be staring over the bodies, perhaps glimpsing some vague future that lies beyond their steaming deaths, but nearer than we think.

“
But it does work,” she says, pained. “More food, more medicine, more water. Times have changed since the Ruin, you know.”

“
I never dreamed ...” I cannot finish. I can barely comprehend the terrible truth of what I have seen. On the harbour, the bodies ... I suppose I thought that they had died in some natural, acceptable way, and merely been stored or placed there. The gunshots I heard, the shouts, and the riots I had placed in a mental file marked ‘Disregard’. My own tenuous hold on reality, perverted by the Ruin, could never stoop as low as this, and so my mind precluded the possibilities that had been laid out so obviously for me to see.

“
I don’t believe it,” I say. I have stopped crying, but the anguish is even deeper now that the tears have dried. “It’s just horrible.”

“
I’m sorry,” Jade says suddenly, “I should have warned you.”

I smile up at her where she stands next to the tricycle, reach for her uninjured hand and feel a warm rush of relief when she returns the pressure of my grasp. That means a lot. It helps.

We turn from the terrible sight and I try to crowd the hateful images from my mind. But though I avert my eyes, my senses will not let me forget. I can still smell the unmistakable stink of death. I can almost
taste
it in the air. Either that, or the bitterness of my own impotence is polluting my body as well as my mind. And even as I cycle away, Jade walking beside me, I can hear the sounds from the pool of dead people. The sounds of dying, and corpses deflating. The sounds of the Ruin.

“
What will happen to them?” I ask.

“
They’ll be put to use,” Jade says quietly. “Things are too bad now to waste anything.”

I cannot ask what she means. I don’t wish to know.

v

We travel a further three miles that day, taking it in turns on the tricycle, before exhaustion claims us. I wait by the side of the road while Jade wanders off to find somewhere to camp, trying to find some shade under a shirt stretched across the handlebars. She is gone for nearly half an hour and I am becoming worried, but this does not stop me from falling asleep. When I wake up she is standing there, looking down at me, a strange expression on her face. Yet again I don’t know whether to be frightened or excited by this unusual, confident, aggressive woman.

We wheel the trike most of the way, but for the last few hundred paces we have to virtually carry it up the steep gradient. By the time we reach the small plateau she has chosen for our camp we are both exhausted, and sleep claims us before we can erect the shelter.

I wake up from a dream of cool water, innocent nakedness beside a waterfall, greenery and fruit growing all about. Jade is rubbing cream into my bare legs where the sun has found its way through the cotton of my trousers, which I see lying in a heap beside me. Before I am fully awake I see that curious expression in her eyes once more and her hands move quickly up to my groin.

Whatever stresses had been tempering Jade’s attitude to me earlier that day seem to have evaporated with the sun. Perhaps it was the tension of knowing what was to come, but feeling unable to tell me beforehand. Maybe the fear that we could have fallen into trouble leaving Malakki Town had distanced her from me; after all, she has been this way before. She is doing all this now as nothing more than a favour for me. Whatever the cause, she seems as happy now as she was last night.

The memories of the day, the trials of the journey thus far, the twinges from my chest cause me to remain limp, even as I watch Jade strip. But she works on me with her hand, her mouth, and soon we are making love under the astonished sky.

We drift towards sleep around midnight. I see a shooting star, but Jade says it is just another falling satellite.

* * *

PART THREE: THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS

i

“
I’m older than you think,” Della said to me. “It’s as if losing my legs provided less of me to age; time can’t find me, sometimes, because I’m not whole, I’m a smaller target than most. I’m older than you think.”

I almost asked how old, but in reality I did not want to know. Her age was just another enigma which identified her, an unknown that made her even more mysterious and exotic in my eyes. She scratched her stumps as I looked around the overgrown garden. I tried to appear blasé but actually felt so nervous in her presence that I could faint. She was not ashamed of her terrible wounds — seemed to display them as a badge of worldliness, sometimes — but still I hated them. It was extremely disorientating looking at the stumps of legs that should continue on down to the floor. Instead, they were cut short at the edge of the wheel chair. Sometimes, when Della scratched them all night, she drew blood. I tried to get her talking.

“
So what happens now?”

It was the start of the Ruin. The Sickness was still to come, lying in wait in some distant African cave like the ghost of a wronged nation ready to exact a chilling, relentless revenge. The first nukes had fallen in the Middle East, and money markets across the globe had crashed the previous month. Britain was already threatening a worldwide ban on trade, import or export. In some areas of the country, martial law had been declared. It was rumoured that people were being shot. In London, the army was hanging looters they caught pillaging the pickings of the Numb-Skull plague in the streets; their bloated bodies became home to fattened, less homely pigeons than those that adorned Nelson’s column.

Della shrugged, rolled her eyes skyward. “Well, you heard them, kiddo, telling everyone how good it would be. The Lord Ships are mighty fine and high, ready, they say, to restore to us all that we’ve lost over the last few years: justice; law; peace; even food. In the process, where do you think the Lords live? What do you reckon they eat?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
Somewhere nicer and something better than you, that’s where and what.” She flinched as her nail caught a fold of skin and opened a cut. A tear of blood formed on the stump and I watched, fascinated, as it grew, swelled and then dropped like a folded petal to the ground. When I looked up, I saw that Della had been watching me watching her.

“
But don’t you think it’ll all work out for us?” I asked, naive and blindly trusting. “They say it’s the answer. ‘Government from afar’, they say.”

“
I think the Lord Ships will last a long time,” she mused. She sat back in her chair and stopped worrying her absent legs. I knew the signs — she was warming to the subject, not only because she loved sharing her wisdom with me, but also because it meant she did not hurt herself. At least, for a time.

“
At the end of that long time,” she continued, “there’re going to be a lot less people in the world. I think the Lords’ll rule adequately, considering, but they’ll also reap any rewards of their labours before anyone else even knows they’re there. The worst thing is ...” She trailed off. This was something that Della never did, she had an angle on everything, an opinion for anyone who would listen. She stared up at the moon where it was emerging from the azure blue of a summer sky. I’m sure that for those few moments she was alone, and she had forgotten how different life had become.

“
What’s the worst thing, Della?” I asked. Each time we spoke, I remembered her every word, repeated them to myself like a mantra as I drifted off to sleep. They were precious to me, in a way priceless. Some people — a few — still read the Bible. My bible was the lake of words I remembered from Della.

“
The worst thing, kiddo, is that they’re going to be gods.”

Della sent me away then, complaining about her stumps, saying her legs were aching and she could only ever put the ghosts to sleep when she was alone. I knew what she meant, but sometimes I lay awake at night, imagining a pair of discorporated limbs stumbling unconnected down a straight, dusty road.

I left Della to her thoughts, knowing that I would benefit from them the next time we met. Della was a treasure.

ii

I wake in the night and hear the distant sounds of engines, protesting as if hauling a huge weight up a steep slope. Disembodied lights climb the darkness in the distance, pause for a while and then continue on their journey. Jade does not hear them, or if she does she pays no attention.

I think of the massacre, of the bodies cooling in the night, providing food for whatever wild creatures remained. I huddle closer to Jade, but sleep eludes me. The darkness is haunted by the silvery twinkle of stars, their brightness distracting and surprising at this altitude. Sometime in the night, just before the darkness flees and there is a brief lull in nature to greet the dawn, I hear a faint sound from the south. A wailing, but possessed of many voices; a calling, like the tortured grind of metal on stone. I sit up and listen harder, but then the birds start singing and their song drowns the noise. I am glad.

When Jade wakes up I tell her, but she merely shrugs and smiles. “Another Lord Ship over the town.”

“
But I didn’t hear it coming.”

“
Sometimes they just drift in from over the sea, then out again. Sometimes, they’re as consistent as the tides.”

I shake my head. “But they’re not manned anymore. The Lords died, or fled.”

Jade shrugs. When she has no answer, she shrugs.

She begins to prepare breakfast — a thick, stodgy gruel made from a paste in her bag and powdered milk, a few drops of water added to lighten the load on our stomachs. She looks tired, as if she was the one kept awake by the night, not me.

“
I heard engines last night,” I say, watching for a reaction. She raises her eyebrows, but she does not look at me. I wonder whether she is beginning to regret her offer of help. I wonder how sane she can really be.

Jade does not speak for the next hour. We eat and wipe our bowls clean, then roll up the sleeping packs ready for transport. I sit for a few minutes on a large rock overlooking the valley we had travelled up the previous day. The Sickness is not too bad today, the pain bearable, the growths only leaking small amounts into my already stained and caked shirt. From my observation point I cannot make out the gully where the bodies lay, nor the dried streambed, not even the wall that had hidden the terrible slaughter from our view. On the horizon, marked more by its haze of smoke than the actual outline of buildings, lies Malakki Town

Jade taps me on the shoulder and informs me that we should be going. I smile, but she is as unreceptive as before. I begin to fear that she is like this because, just as yesterday morning, there are things to be seen today that she cannot bring herself to talk of. The thought stretches the skin over my scalp with terror, but I cannot bring myself to ask. I try to remember our sex from the night before, but it seems like the memory of another person’s story, told long ago.

iii

Around midday I see the first of the birds. It is high up, almost out of sight in the glare of the callous sun. It is circling in a way that induces a vague feeling of disquiet; drifting, around and around, wings steady.

“
Look up there,” I say. Jade stops and follows my gaze.

“
Nearly there,” she says.

I feel a jolt which seems to trigger a rush of blood from my chest. I slump on the saddle, slip sideways onto the hot dust of the road. A groan escapes me as the light-headedness dulls my vision.

“
String?” I manage to whisper through the haze of pain.

“
Just over that brow,” Jade replies. I try to hear pity in her voice, but even my own yearnings cannot paint indifference a different shade. “Come on.”

She grabs under my armpits and heaves me back into the trike’s saddle. I have no strength to pedal, so she has to push me the final stretch to the top of the small hill. As we reach the summit and look down into the shallow valley beyond, I am dazzled by something in the distance. At first I think it is the sun reflecting from a body of water, and my heart leaps into my chest. Water! A wash! A bath, even! Then, while my eyes adjust to the glare and detail rushes in, I realise how wrong I am.

What I do see is far more fantastic than a deep lake in an area stricken with drought.

There is a small village in the valley. The collection of tents and ramshackle huts seems discordant with my preconceived image of String and his people, but the closer I look the more I can detect a design in the apparent chaos of the scene. The whole layout of the place is pleasing to the eye — not only providing colour in a bland land blasted by winds and heat, but also offering a geometry that seems to comfort with its very order.

Around the village is a moat. The sun reflects from something bright, hard edged, many angled. Jade turns to me and truly smiles for just about the first time that day.