Steps (15 page)

“Can you tell Him to go away?”

Edwin hugged his daughter to him. “I don’t think I can do that, Baby Bird.”

Moore sidled next to them and said, “That cut on your arm will fester, especially now that you got lake water in it. I have some stitch glue and disinfectant.”

“Save it,” Edwin said.

She ignored him and sprayed the arm with iodine and rubbed it into the cut. The lack of pain surprised Edwin, and when she squeezed the stitch glue into it and wrapped gauze around his arm, he felt nothing more than a sting and some pressure.

Dawn came as she worked, and the forest fire burned hotter on the mountain, all of it consuming with endless appetite everything in its path. Gentry paced along the shore in one direction, Fletcher in the other, while Arroyo on his ruined leg sat on a log facing the lake. Moore sat with Edwin and Shelly Lynn, and they watched the bonfire as the sun crested the lake and dug its nails into the overhanging smoke.

The fire burned away much of the mountainside and died down in parts, leaving orange patches here and there, and a wavering cloud of smoke to mark its passing. Shelly Lynn lay quiet against Edwin’s shoulder, and he could not remember when she had fallen asleep. The morning became otherwise quiet, and nobody noticed how long Billings had been missing until they heard a yell from atop the cliff.

Billings appeared on the lip of the ridge, his metal leg exposed where he had torn away the pants, his rifle slung across his chest. On his shoulder rested a boy who at first Edwin did not recognize as Perry. Billings had used his pant leg to bind Perry’s hands and feet and to gag his mouth.

“Down that way!” Billings yelled. He pointed, and Edwin left his daughter with Moore, while he and Fletcher jogged the shore to where Billings would have an easier time descending.

Chapter 27

Mountain Waters   
(Man)

T
he coals in Man’s chest burned as he slept. He rose and gathered wood, bathed in the stream, collected a trout and a dove and placed them at Woman’s feet for cleaning in the dawn. The skies were as oppressive with smoke as they had been with rain, bloated with black clouds that rolled and thundered, and he ran beneath them to the road, always finding a path through the flames and clean air in his lungs.

He stood in the road and listened. The fire thundered as it fed. It would burn out soon, so much of it meeting itself in the mountains and having no more on which to feed. This was not something of lightning or carelessness, and it would not go on for weeks, or even days. This was the ravaging fury of the Father, and it consumed with a greed Man had forgotten and would like to forget again soon.

The cabin would be burned away, ashes among the ash of trees, among the ash of bones and the enamel of teeth. He thought of his children in the woods consumed by the Beast, and felt thankful for the mercy of painlessness the Father dealt them when the Beast took its due. He listened for things beyond the pop and crack and whistle-whump of the forest fire, and after a while he heard the moan of dying things, this one a deer, this one a pig, a family of raccoons, the howl of a bobcat and the ever-present buzz of the ground insects as they met their end. He held his breath to quiet the blood in his ears, and as the sun rose, he marked the death throes of his woodland brethren.

Among the sounds came one unfamiliar, and at first he thought of creatures long departed, until he marked the screech as a human throat under the grip of the Beast. He ran toward the sound and found a group of his children lying among the ashes. Two of them lived, charred things not worthy of life. He broke their necks and focused on one who had climbed a tree to survive the blaze. She shrieked down on him in the manner of a monkey-thing. Her voice rang throughout the mountainside. The skin on her legs, arms, and face peeled away from the bone where the fire had licked her . Her eyes held the mountain flames as if they might be captive inside her head. Man leaned against the tree until it snapped, and when she found her feet and fled through the woods, Man chased her. He lifted her, and with the swiftness of habit bent her neck and placed her face-down on the ground. For a while he stood over her listening for others. They had come to the hills from the soldier’s camp and from camps beyond the mountains, more necks than he had hands, more mercy than he had heart.

Man navigated the smoldering forest until he returned to his camp. He stopped beside his shelter, empty, held his nose to the wind searching for Woman, turned and jogged down the trail to the stream. Her scent grew strong, and for a moment he splashed through the water as if she might be somewhere beneath soaking herself. She was not here, either. Man rotated his head downstream and inhaled, upstream and inhaled, and when he gauged the stronger scent, he followed the shore downstream until it took a sharp bend.

He knelt and touched her footprint. He put his nose to it and closed his eyes, and when he breathed her in, he saw her and she wrapped around him, but when he opened his eyes, she faded away. He touched the air around him to affirm his eyes, unable to feel with his fingers the scent so fierce in his nose.

Man put his head back and sang the only song he knew, a single and high-pitched note akin to an animal howl, but with the distinct chord of a human throat. The song bounced off the mountain rock and the stream’s surface, and it echoed long after he clamped his mouth shut and listened for an answer. He heard no answer, and so he sniffed until he oriented himself to Woman’s path, and then he tracked the scent down the stream.

When he reached the rock-paved road at the foot of the mountain, he stopped, knelt, and searched until he found one of Woman’s footprints, no more than the pressing of grass which had survived the fire along the shore of the stream. He touched the print, sang his song, and listened.

The stream dove beneath the road. Man passed under the bridge, a culvert whose echoes reminded him of red caves, salty minerals, the drippings of seepage, and Woman’s soft songs beneath the dancing wall-shadows of the fire. He smelled the scent of Woman and heard the splash of his feet in the shallows, and then he emerged on the other side of the road, gliding through the forest.

Here the forest fire scorched the ground clean. Many trees stood in defiance, green tops with blackened trunks, and amid the limbs he heard the chitter of climbing and flying animals, squirrels, birds, coons and possums.

Man ran faster as Woman’s scent intensified, and he ducked when the stream wound beneath the road again. He splashed through the culvert and into the forest. The trees had been pressed flat, sprawled away from a crater like the starburst of a flower. The few trees standing were scorched and silent.

The stream widened. The ground grew soft with silt as the water slowed and pooled into the lake near the base of the mountain. Along the shore of the lake, Man found Woman’s footprints among several others, and when he put his nose to them and filtered through the scents, he recognized them as Shelly Lynn and the others from the cabin.

He tracked the shore until Woman’s footprints led into the underbrush, up the bank, and into a burned patch of forest. He crossed a dirt road and came to a stretch spared the forest fire. Woman’s footprints followed the ruts of a truck as they cut into a yard toward a decrepit house. Her footprints diverged from the ruts and led up the steps of the house and through the door. Man stopped in the doorway and listened. In the room beyond the hallway, he heard the coo of Woman’s mourning song, and he waited until she fell silent before he ducked beneath the door and made his way to her.

She sat on the floor in a child’s room with a child’s head on her lap. The side of the child’s head had been cleaved in, and the blood of it smeared Woman’s hands and thighs. Blood smeared her breasts where she had pressed the child’s remains to no effect. Woman did not look up as he stood behind her, but her breath changed, and he knew she felt him.

Woman sat with the child through the afternoon, and Man stood behind her unmoving. When darkness came and the shadows stretched into the house, Woman sang her song of nursing infants, placed the child’s head on the floor and stood.

She spoke to Man. “To their own children?”

“The Beast claimed the child,” he said. “Even I have done this thing. This has been the way of things since after the Time-Before.”

“I see. And are they not worth sparing? Are we?”

“That is for the Father to say.”

“I see. Come.”

Woman led him onto the porch, and they followed the truck ruts past the house until they dropped off the embankment and into the lake. She crouched. Man crouched with her, and they crept to the edge until they overlooked the rugged man-camp.

She pointed at the fire. “They burn their dead?”

Man said nothing because he had no answer, but after a while he added, “Or they place them in the ground. Or the water. Or they eat them.”

“I see. And yet the Father shows Himself to them?”

“Only to the bone of your bone, those who took of your milk.” Man pointed to the girl-child and the woman-soldier sitting next to her. Then he pointed to the man-father standing alone by the lake with his back to the fire, hands slack by his side gripping an axe, all of him as unmoving as the mud at his feet. “Those of my bone see nothing of the Father, nor hear Him. It is the child-bearers who see and feel and hear the Father. This is the way of things, as it was in the Time-Before. The Father knows the one and the many of the givers of children, and none of those who hunt the food. The Beast shows no such distinction.”

Man pointed to the man-child bound by his feet and arms, gagged from screaming, thrashing atop a pile of ruined blankets and flattened underbrush. The boy’s body stiffened, shook, and through the gag came the soft whimper of his suffering, too low for Woman’s ears even though she seemed to sense it. As was her way, she turned from the boy and poked through the dirt until she found a root. She plucked it, an inedible thing, wiped away the dirt and placed it in her mouth and sucked on it anyway. Man waited with her in silence as she contemplated her woman-thoughts.

The man-father came to his son and lay beside him, and after a while they both fell quiet. The woman-soldier and the girl-child took their place nestled near the fire, cradled next to the smallest of the soldiers. One soldier leaned against the log and placed his rifle across his chest. The two remaining soldiers propped themselves in front of the bounty of the camp as if to ward off thieves.

After they slept and the night became bloated with their silence, Man raised his nose, smelled only the fire and the scent of those below, and said to Woman, “You have come down the mountain, wife.” He pointed across the lake and up the slopes toward their camp, where in the daylight he could see the thin line of a mountain road etched in the side of the rock.

“Yours is the mastery of this world.” She touched his nose and ear, and ran a finger across his lips and down his long-tooth. “Mine is the mastery of the world beyond. The Father’s eyes are forever averted from us. But let us walk among the last of our children.”

Woman stood, and Man stood with her, and when she put a foot to the slope and reached for his hand, he guided her down, balancing her as they descended until they stood on the shore facing the raging fire. She crept through the camp and stroked each on their head. She touched her mouth to their ear and whispered her lullaby song. When they breathed so quietly they might not be breathing at all, Woman knelt beside the boy bound next to his father, the one consumed by the Beast. She sang into his ear and his bloody eyes snapped open. He strained against the bindings, and if she had not first seduced the others into sleep, they would have awakened from the violence the boy dealt to his own body in an effort to free it.

Woman did not turn away as the boy writhed and kicked. She did not dig for roots, but sang on until his cries softened and his legs calmed. She sang so long that Man left her and gathered wood for the fire. He entered the lake and hauled ashore first one catfish and then another, gutting and skinning and hanging them by the fire to dry.

On and on she sang, until dawn painted a silver reflection of the overhanging smoke onto the surface of the lake. The others slept as she sang for the boy with his red eyes locked onto Woman, and as the sun rose into noon, Woman removed the binding from the boy’s mouth and pulled his head to her breast. He took of her savagely, and on she sang. Her eyes swelled shut with tears, and her voice cracked, and on she sang. Her cries evolved to shrieks as she switched breasts to the one undestroyed, and her song became the shrill notes of childbirth and the rending of flesh.

She had no strength to stand afterward, and so Man lifted her and carried her down the bank, into the water and let her drink of it. She did not meet his eyes as he poured water across her ruined breasts. The gashes remained even with the touching of water, and Man thought of the Time-Before when she had last bled during the birth of their children and sang these songs. Water had doused the pain of her wounds, and the Father had shown Himself and wiped away her blood.

“There is no undoing it, husband,” Woman said.

Man followed as Woman emerged from the water. She pointed, and he lifted the boy and waded him into the water where Woman washed away the blood and sang to him. His eyes burned with the red hate of the Beast, and his teeth tore at her, and Man considered delivering mercy to the boy, but Woman’s was not the heart of a hunter. So he held the boy as she washed him, and when she finished, he returned him to his father.

She touched the boy’s forehead and stared long at his father. Woman straightened and padded to the woman-soldier cradling the Shelly Lynn. She knelt and lifted Shelly Lynn in her arms. Woman kissed her forehead and whispered a song in her ear. “It will not be long before the Beast comes for them. For my sin the Father unleashed the Beast upon our children. We have only to wait. The Beast will come for us when this work is finished.”

He wanted to say again it was not her sin. The Beast fed on the children, not the Father. The children drifted away from the Father, into the open waters of the Beast to be consumed. Her sin had been no more than another volley in a war raging since time eternal, long before the Father carved Man’s bones from the dirt, long before He formed Woman’s flesh from his bone. These words had formed on his tongue more times than the forest had leaves, and still she felt the weight of a sin that was not hers to bear. She longed to change a clap of thunder heralding the storm, felt the blame of the strike, and mourned the rain. It was not her fault. In the end, Man said nothing, but followed Woman down the shore as she carried Shelly Lynn and sang her lullaby song.