White and Other Tales of Ruin (20 page)

Voices reach me, quiet and muted, issuing orders. Then the sound of wheels on the dusty ground, like a fingernail on sandpaper. I push through the plants, breathing heavily to draw in the smell of growing, living things. Dark shapes dart away from me, one of them scampering across my feet with a panicked patter of claws. I walk into what can only be a spider’s web, the soft silk wrapping around my face and neck, and rub frantically to clear it away. After a time I begin to think I am lost, walking in circles between the ranks of plants, but then I reach the opposite bank. I’m surprised at how wide the stream bed is. It looked a lot narrower in the daylight.

A voice mutters nearby. I’m sure it is Tiarnan, the guard who brought us in. His tone is quiet but firm, confident but casual, as if he’s well used to what he’s doing. I crawl slowly up the bank until I can see over the gentle ridge.

The sound of wheels begins again as I catch my first glimpse of the wagon. It is about the size of a car, a flat-bedded trailer moving roughly on four bare wheels. There are three men pushing it. In the darkness, at first, I can barely make out what they are transporting. But as it nears me on its obvious journey into the ravine, sudden realisation strikes. It looks like a cargo of clothes, but why three men to push it?

Bodies. Piled high on the cart, limbs protruding here and there, moving with a rhythmic
thump thump
that could so easily be the sound of a head jerking up and down against the wood.

I gasp, duck down, a scream screeching for release. But I contain it. Somehow, I hold in my terror and let it manifest itself only inside; a rush of blood pulses to the growths in my chest and bursts one, and I have the sudden certainty that I am about to die, here, now, within sight of a strange crime and an expanse of lush plants. My breath comes in ragged gasps, as if someone else is controlling my respiration. I try to calm down, but my heart will not listen to me. I want to double up in agony, the pain from my chest sending tendrils of poison into my veins, spreading it slowly but surely throughout my body.

That’s the poison from the Sickness, I tell myself, it’s leaking into me and soon I’ll die. And then maybe they’ll add me to the cart and wheel me away, to wherever they’re taking the hundreds of other meaningless corpses. I take another look over the bank and see Tiarnan standing down by the glass moat, exposed in starlight. He and three other men are lifting bodies from the moat-boat onto a second cart. As I watch, Tiarnan’s partner fumbles and there is a sickening clout as the body hits the ground head first. He bends to pick it up, and I hear something which makes it all seem so much worse, if that is possible — a quiet laugh.

I turn and try to spot the first cart, but it has already been swallowed by the blackness. The grumbling of its wheels sounds like the gurglings of a giant’s insides, issuing from the dark throat of the ravine. I wonder where they are taking the bodies. A breeze sighs through the rows of plants at my back.

It’s the fertiliser, String had said.

The lake of dead bodies; the massacre I had heard and not seen, the terrible twitching of the dying as flies already began to settle on the fresh blood; the sound of wagons that night, a mile or more from where Jade and I had made love and slept.

I feel sick. Not just nausea brought on by the Sickness, but a sickness of the soul. I double up in pain as more tainted blood floods my system. As utter darkness begins to blank out the moon and stars, and the agony recedes into faintness, the last thing I hear is the interminable rumble of the loaded carts being pushed across the stony ground. Again, and again.

vii

Jade is looking down at me. I experience brief but vivid déjà vu. Is Jade my guardian angel? Her face is a mask of concern. As my eyelids flutter open she looks up, beckons someone over. I think the sky is a deep grey colour, but then realise that I am inside one of the tents.

String is there. He looks similarly worried, though is eyes betray something else, a confidence that I find strangely repulsive.

“
Jade, I saw ...” I begin, but though I remember espying something terrible, I cannot recall exactly what it was.

“
Keep still,” she says, a quiver in her voice, “just lie still. The Sickness almost had you. String gave you the cure. Rubbed it on your chest, your temples, your throat. He thought you might have been too far gone, so he fed you some of it as well.”

“
Fed me?”

Jade shrugs apologetically. “A tube, into your stomach. You’ll have a sore throat for a while. You were wandering around in the fruit plantation when I found you, mumbling, calling a woman’s name. You looked like the walking dead.”

Memories begin to force their way into the light. With them come terrible images, and an awful realisation that turns me cold.

“
Jade, I saw bodies, hundreds of bodies. They’re using them, storing them.” I am whispering, but as soon as I begin String appears above me again, his hand lowering towards my face. I cry out, certain that he is going to silence me forever, but Jade is holding me down as String places his hand on my forehead. His skin is cool and clammy.

“
He’s burning up. It’s a fight, now, between the Sickness and the cure. I hope I got him in time, but sometimes it’s a matter of will. The cure is just the catalyst.”

Faintness clouds my vision, but I bite my lip and try to stay conscious. I have to tell Jade, warn her, make her get away from this place.

“
Will you tell him?” I hear her ask. I can imagine her expression, distant and worried, just as she looked when there was more bad stuff for me to know.

“
Not yet.” String replies. “Later, when he’s better. Not now.”

“
I think he saw something,” Jade whispers.

I sense String looking down at me. “I’ll have words with Tiarnan. Stay with him, Jade. He’s got a fight on his hands.” Footsteps recede into the distance. All I can see is the unremitting greyness above me. “If you need me, ask someone to find me. I have some work to do.”

Jade bends over me again, softly telling me to be quiet, conserve my strength. And although I have some things to tell her, my body forces me to obey her. I drift once more into welcoming unconsciousness.

viii

I feel different. Lighter. As if a weight, both physical and mental, has been lifted from me.

I sit up. I am still in the tent, but alone. The flap moves softly in the breeze.

Again, I wonder whether I’m dreaming. But the bed beneath me, hard and slightly bowed in the centre, feels solid. The air smells good, laden with the scents of cooking. I have a burning thirst and a sore throat. That’s where they put the tube in.

“
Jade!” I can hear nothing from outside. Inside I feel changed. I suddenly realise what is different.

I lift the rough cloth shirt I am wearing and look at my chest. The growths are crusted black with leaked blood, looking like shrivelled mushrooms sprouting from dead flesh. But I am not dead. It is the Sickness that is no more, stumped in its tracks, driven from within to shows itself as a crispy, rotten mess on the outside. Displaying its true nature.

Tentatively I lift my hand, suddenly desperate to touch myself there but aware of the pain which will inevitably come with the contact.

“
Go on,” Jade says from the entrance. “It’s all right. Touch it. See what happens.”

I look up, all wide eyed and scared. Jade is smiling and the expression suits her. I touch one of the growths with my fingertips, barely brushing it. It feels hard and dry, like an over-cooked sausage. There is no pain, no sensation of contact at all. I touch it again and jump as it falls off and tumbles to the ground. Lying in the dust, it looks like nothing.

Beneath the old growth there is a flash of bright pink skin. New skin.

“
It’ll fade to white,” Jade says, moving towards me, tears in her eyes. “What did I tell you? Isn’t he something?”

“
I feel different,” I say.

“
You’re better. I remember the feeling. You’re just not used to being healthy. It’s cleaned your blood, driven out all the bad stuff. You’re cured, Gabe.” She runs her hand across my chest and the growths come off, sprinkling into my lap and onto the floor like a shower of black hailstones. All I feel is a slight resistance, a tugging at my chest. “You’re beautiful.”

I reach out for her and hold her close, crying, feeling happy and sad and scared all at the same time. “Jade, I saw something terrible.”

She pulls away. “The bodies?”

I nod, struck dumb with surprise.

“
Gabe ...” Jade looks away, avoiding my eyes, and I terrify myself by laughing. It reminds me of the soft laugh of Tiarnan’s partner as he dropped the body, but that only makes it harder to stop. I want to hate myself but find I can’t.

“
Is this really the last thing, Jade?” I ask through tears of mixed emotion. “Is there anything else after this? Whatever it is I’m going to be told, or see, now?”

She looks at me nervously, shaking her head. “This is just about the biggest, Gabe.”

We stay silent for a while, me waiting for her to talk, Jade sniffing and wiping tears away from her cheeks. She cannot meet my gaze, her hands will not touch me. We are islands separated by a deep sea of knowledge. I am waiting for her to let me take the plunge.

“
Right,” she says, standing back and preparing herself. She looks into my eyes. Suddenly, I don’t want to hear what she is going to say. Out of everything possible, any words, that is the last thing I want to hear. Because it is something terrible. “Right,” she says again, wringing her hands. I swing my legs from the bed in readiness to flee the tent, steal the moat-boat and make my escape before she can say any more. But String is standing in the doorway. I pause, my heart thumping inextricably clean blood around my body, but find myself too scared to enjoy the sensation.

“
Shall I tell him, Jade?”

She shakes her head. “It’s about time I levelled with him, I think.” I sit back down. Jade steps closer until we are almost touching.

“
Gabe, the cure that String gave you is distilled in the presence of the tomb, under the mountain, in the realm of the flight of birds, from the brain fluid of the dead.” She turns away and looks pleadingly at String.

I feel empty, emotionless, a void. I should feel sick, I suppose, but I’ve had far too much of that already. I’m shocked, but somehow not as surprised as perhaps I should be. I feel disgust, but second-hand, as if this is all happening to someone else. “Oh,” is all I can say.

“
All things must be made use of, Gabe,” String says, a note of desperation in his voice as if he’s trying to persuade himself as well as me. “It’s a new world. If humanity wants to go and slaughter itself, then at least I can bring some small measure of good from it.”

“
Did you kill them?” I ask. It seems the most important question to me, the pivotal factor that will enable me to handle what has happened, or not.

“
What?” String seems surprised. He could just be buying time.

“
Did you kill them? All the dead people I saw last night. Being taken into the mountain. Did you kill them?”

“
No.” He looks me in the eye, his gaze unwavering. He smiles grimly, tilts his head to the side. “No. You heard them killed, so Jade tells me. You saw them dying out there, alone, in the heat. We just use the raw material.”

“
Brain fluid?” I am filled with a grotesque fascination in what has happened to me, abhorrence countered with a perverse fascination. I wonder briefly how he knows of the cure — how he discovered it — but shove it from my mind like an unwanted guilt.

String nods. “Yes. I won’t tell you the details.”

“
Good,” Jade murmurs. “Gabe, come here. Come here.” She throws her arms around me, hugs me to her. I can feel her tears as they drip onto my shoulders, run down my chest. It feels good.

“
Are you leaving?” String says.

“
Damn right!” I don’t believe I could stay here.

He smiles, and this one touches his eyes. “Good.” He turns away.

“
String.” He glances back, squinting either at the sun or in preparation for whatever else I’m going to say. “Thank you.” He nods as he walks away.

Later, Jade and I leave. The moat-boat takes us across the broken glass. I realise that I have never considered what the moat is intended as protection against; now, I do not want to know. I try to avoid standing on the darker patches in the wood, but they are everywhere, and it is almost impossible.

String is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is beneath the mountain, beyond the place of books in the cavern that the birds know all about. Brewing.

Tiarnan has had the trike oiled and serviced. This time, on the way back down the mountain, we take it in turns.

* * *

PART FIVE: THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS

i

“
Sometimes, you’ll have to put up with bad things to accept some good,” Della said. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth’, and all that. Sometimes, you may not understand how good can come from events so terrible. But there are places we were never meant to see, ideas we were never meant to know. Even if it’s a person doing these things, it’s with blind faith, not pure understanding. Maybe that’s why it’s so special.”