alt.human (33 page)

Walking was hard, her clothes damp and heavy, her limbs tired from lack of sleep.

“Well,” said Frankhay, sucking air across his teeth in a half-click of disappointment. “!¡
resigned
¡! I don’t see me no mountains, then...”

The landscape tumbled before the two of them, mostly wooded, broken by a few cleared areas and the meandering snake of the river. It was like this until the distant grey land merged with the grey of the horizon.

No mountains. No city of ten spires.

A
S WE DESCENDED
from the hill, the trail petered out until we were just walking through the forest. We plotted a course from the sun, as we had learned to do, maintaining a straight eastward course rather than following the meandering path of the Swayne. We would meet the river again before long, and save several days’ travelling by doing this.

The going was tough, but Hope found that she coped more easily than some of the others. Frankhay, in particular, struggled. He didn’t complain, but soon he stopped talking, concentrating on catching his breath, wincing at the aches and pains in his body as he crossed the uneven ground.

Skids, too, was struggling. We had already travelled a great distance from Laverne and his wiry frame carried no spare reserves. Now, he had the shaky walk of an addict or someone with a serious illness.

It did not bode well. We had not seen our destination from the top of the hill, so we clearly had a considerable distance still to travel.

Hope watched the ground just ahead of her footfalls, each step smooth, fluid. It was as if she could walk forever.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT,
we made camp in not so much a clearing as a slight thinning of the trees. Bracken grew here in great clumps, and we could trample this down into a layer that broke the hard ground a little.

Jerra and Divine set off immediately to hunt birds. Since leaving Laverne, they had grown adept at hunting with slingshots, crossbow bolts and gunshot being too valuable commodities to expend in this way. Their hauls of small songbirds had been invaluable.

With Saneth, Frankhay and Skids sore and exhausted from the day’s walk, that left me, Marek and Hope to forage for food. Like Divine and Jerra, we had found little on our journey.

Pickings were thin on the ground that evening. We found a few clumps of nettles we could boil down to make bitter tea, and a few pine cones which might yield seeds.

Fungi taunted us with their abundance. Bulbous, gaudy growths on fallen trees, dainty parasols thrusting from the ground, great dusty spheres, wrinkled folds of yellow and brown holding tiny pools of water and dead insects... The only wild fungi I had ever eaten were the little white-cap mushrooms that grew in Laverne’s parks, delicate and nutty, and the small brown, thin-stalked phreak-caps that made you see strange colours and lights and distortions of the world around you.

“!¡
impatient
¡! We should try them,” said Marek, pointing to a brown fungal slab growing at head-height from a tree. “Look: something’s taken a chunk out of that one. It must be edible. That one alone’s a meal for at least three of us!”

“!¡
cautious | irritated
¡! We have no way of knowing if any of them are poisonous or not,” I said. “All we know is that
some
are. If you want to try some then go ahead, but I’m not touching them.”

Marek clicked derisively and sliced at the growth with his knife. The thing oozed grey-blue juices and he backed away, wiping his blade on his backside.

Hope kept her distance, wandering through the trees, occasionally stooping to scrape at the leaf-mould with her knife, or turn a small log with the toe of her boot. I wondered if this mattered to her, if she even needed to eat at all or was merely going through the motions, continuing her masquerade as real flesh and blood.

Back in the clearing, someone had started a fire, but we had little but a few seeds and leaves to cook on it, and not even much water to boil them in.

The night was cold and I longed for some shared body warmth. Skids was shivering, and the two of us huddled close. I dreamed that Hope had joined us in the night and that she was real, but when I woke and peered around the near pitch-dark camp, she was still lying alone a short distance away.

When I woke next, with a thin light spreading through the trees, there was a stiffness to the bracken, a sharp chill in the air, and I realised that there had been the first delicate frost of the coming winter.

H
OPE BARELY SLEPT
that night. The bracken was scratchy, the ground seemed so much harder than it had on other nights, and she was intensely aware of the scale of the forest around us. She had seen it from the crest of the hill, trees covering every fold of the land, the dark green of pines, the golds and browns and greens of the oaks and chestnuts and beech. Trees as far as she could see, before the drizzly sky merged with the forest to form an indistinct horizon.

When she did sleep, though, she dreamed of the spired city. Lit by a shaft of sunlight, with ragged black crows circling around the towers, and forest spreading right up to the buildings like the waves of a dark sea.

And in her head, the voices of all humankind sang loud, sang high, sang exultant.

W
E WALKED, HUNGRY
and cold and in ever lower spirits.

In the forest, it was hard even to be sure we were sticking to the right course, but whenever we paused to rest, if there was sunlight enough breaking through the trees, Marek did a thing with a stick poked into the ground, where he plotted the line its shadow took as the sun moved and each time found east again.

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! We had some training back in Angiere,” he explained to Hope. “We had to pass it on to those we smuggled out. Some basic survival skills.”

Hope turned away. She felt uncomfortable with Marek trying to make conversation. She did not know how to respond. Sometimes she felt as if, rather than having her head crammed with something extra, there was something missing from within her, some element that others took for granted, an understanding of how to connect.

When Jerra killed a crow, we debated cooking it now or waiting.

“!¡
disdainful
¡! Look at it,” snapped Marek. “A scrap of feathers and bones. Not even a mouthful between us. We carry on, we gather as we walk, we try the fruit of the forest” – he meant the fungi we had not dared try until now – “we wait until we have a meal and won’t just be fighting over scraps.”

Nobody liked what he said, or the way that he said it, but we gathered ourselves together and resumed the journey.

By the middle of the day we had another crow, some chestnuts and a bunch of skinny mushrooms that looked like the kind we might once have found on a market stall in the city. Despite these riches, the meal was sparse, a thin stew cooked in water from the stagnant pools in the bed of what must be a stream in the rainy season.

Resuming the march, I became aware of how the food had at least warmed me against the sudden chill of the air. I loosened my jacket, and then my shirt.

By the time the sun hung low in the sky and we were starting to look for somewhere to settle for the night, I knew we had made a stupid mistake. Eating anything without being sure that it was safe... Bad water, meat from birds that looked emaciated and pestilent – why had they sat so low in the trees, just waiting to be shot? – Marek’s innocent-looking fungi...

It may have been any or all of these that struck us down.

Divine had already vanished into the trees for a time, catching us up with her face pale as a cloud and black shadows etched beneath her eyes.

We had come to a patch of woodland where a tree had fallen and shafts of sunlight spilled through when the first cramp gripped my belly. “!¡
non-committal
¡! Here’s as good as any,” I said. It had been a long day. I just wanted to stop.

Pain stabbed and I clutched at my abdomen. Then I was throwing up and there were fibres of green nettle and dock in my puke and the pain in my belly was more intense than anything I’d ever felt before.

We stopped there, Divine already off among the trees emptying herself from both ends, Frankhay vomiting, Jerra squatting and letting rip a jet of brown liquid from beneath his kilt, and everyone else exchanging looks, wondering who would be next.

I dropped to my knees and retched again and again, someone holding my shoulders to support me. Skids. Speaking to me, trying to distract me from the pain and the burning in my throat and the heat. And then he let go, turned away, and threw up, just as I felt my guts cramping and I fumbled with my trousers and lay on my side on the ground, emptying myself.

More hands on me, turning me. Small hands, walnut-brown, surprisingly strong, firm.

Hope.

I didn’t want her touching me, tending me. Not now. Not ever. Didn’t want her wiping at my soiled body with bunches of leaves. Didn’t want her trying to get me comfortable.

Didn’t want any of it.

N
IGHT-TIME, AND MY
symptoms had retreated to stomach cramps and a fever. A fever cooled by a light hand on my forehead.

I shifted, withdrawing from Hope’s touch.

She didn’t appear to have been ill at all, but then that made sense because, despite what Saneth might say about her humanity, she was not one of us.

Even then, I was aware of the irony. If she had been human, I would have longed for her not to suffer this sickness, but now I wanted her to suffer, resented her for not sharing in this curse that had befallen us.

I rolled onto my back and winced at the pain in my gut.

She put a hand out and I batted it away angrily.

“!¡
hostile
¡! Get away from me,” I hissed. In the dim light from the remains of a fire someone had lit I saw the shock on Hope’s face, but I didn’t care.

“But...” she said, and then stopped.

“!¡
angry | confrontational
¡! Look at you,” I said. “Here we are, heaving our guts out, and you just sit there, untouched. You’re not
like
us. You’re not human. Why should you care? Why should you care about any of us?”

She stared at me, and suddenly it was as if I had just slapped a baby.

I dipped my head, struck by another wave of nausea, and when I looked up again she had risen to her feet and turned away, leaving me to wallow in my filth and heat and resentment.

Chapter Thirty

H
OPE HAD WATCHED
curiously as one by one we fell ill, leaving only her and Saneth untouched. She expected at any time to be taken with the illness, but she was not.

She remained well, and it reinforced her feeling that there was something missing.

She was an incomplete woman, and that was why I did not return her feelings.

She knew enough to boil the water she collected from puddles on the ground and in the joints of trees. Under Saneth’s direction, she used Marek’s sparker to get a fire going, and then collected water and boiled it in the fold-out bucket we carried.

She tended to me and the others, feeding us cooled, boiled water, mopping us with handfuls of leaves, trying to soothe and make us as comfortable as possible.

She saw us through the worst of it, and in return I vented my anger.

“Y
OU’RE NOT
LIKE
us. You’re not human. Why should you care? Why should you care about any of us?”

She stared at me in the gloom, clutching the hand I had swatted away.

Not human
.

It was what she had feared. She wasn’t like the rest of us. She was less than human, something missing, just a vessel carrying the awful raucous mob of voices in her head.

She wasn’t human, and I had seen that, and that was why I didn’t want her.

She stood, turned away, left me in my self-pity and anger. Walked off into the forest, alone, thinking she might walk forever, leave us all behind, but then she became aware of hot tears sliding down her face, and in that moment she felt weak and very human indeed, and she sank to her haunches and sobbed.

Why did she care? Why
should
she care about any of this?

She went back to the encampment, and there was Marek, sitting up against a tree, watching her. She went to him, kneeled, reached an arm across his chest.

His skin was cold and clammy and he reeked of vomit, but he welcomed her touch, returned it, and this made her feel just a little bit human again.

T
HE NEXT DAY
we were fit for little more than sitting around and waiting to get less ill.

Saneth took Divine’s slingshot and vanished into the forest, returning some time later with three pigeons and a tiny warbler. Hope and Marek gathered nettles and grass; anything that could be boiled into a broth.

None of us felt like eating and no one wanted to trust the food, fearful of what our previous meal had done to us, but we forced some down anyway.

The broth gave me strength, and I was able to stand and walk a short distance. Divine had been hit harder than anyone, but she was strong and soon back on her feet.

“!¡
tired
¡! How much more?” I asked late that afternoon, as we gathered around the fire. We were a sorry-looking bunch, huddled and thin, bags under our eyes and carrying a general air of gloom. “How far is it to Harmony?”

We all turned to Hope.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a map in my head. I don’t have a way to measure. All I know is what I have seen, and that is if we follow the river to the mountains that’s where we’ll find Harmony.”

Travelling through forest like this, we had no way of knowing. We had to trust that Marek’s readings had kept us heading east, and that we would meet the river again at some point. But we had no way of knowing where we were. We could see such a short distance through the trees – for all we knew the mountains might be close, or they might still be too distant even to see.