The boy gazes after her for a time, then turns his eyes fleetingly to my window.
For a while, like an Indian summer, I am well in the midst of my dying. I come to the window each morning and the boy is there clutching a bit of protein toast, or drawing in the dust. Sometimes he reads. That tells me he is educated. I wonder what he is reading as a breeze riffles the pages. Occasionally he looks up at my window.
He knows I am here. Often, he looks up at the apartments where the man upstairs lives. His attention seems divided between his upstairs neighbour and me. Two people he has never seen. Once the man in the room above him bumped the old blind as we watched from our two vantage points, that boy and I. Or perhaps it was only a breeze. The boy nodded to himself. What does he see?
A picture comes into my mind of the boy and his mother listening to the man upstairs shambling back and forwards through the yellow murk, stopping occasionally to scratch at the floor. A despair fills me at the thought of them fearing the man and fearing the beast. All this fear creates a stink that will rouse the beast and draw it to them.
That night I crossed myself, then gave the warding-off sign which my granny had taught me. A gypsy showed her. The priest had told me God could help drive off the beast if it ever came to me, but I felt my granny was a more serious contender. I wish now she had told me more about how to deal with the beast. But all she did was warn me that I could not run from what ailed me, or the world.
‘It’s all linked, lad. You are the world and it is you. You can’t flee from one bit of the world by going to another. You can’t run away from your mouth or your feet.’
I had laughed and kissed her and swung her round till she squealed and whacked me across the ear. The red-haired girl laughed.
‘Ow!’ I laughed too. ‘What makes you think I’m running away and not running to something?’
She had only smiled, showing blunt, naked gums. ‘You can’t run from what you are.’
I had gone over the great seas, saved and worked and done a few shady things before I got a librarian’s certificate. I thought I would educate myself the rest of the way. With the world in such a state, I wanted to get away from the beast on the rampage. I lost myself in books. I loved them, but in the end the oldest books began to smell to me like the cottage I was born in. The papers reeked of my mother’s dank tears and my father’s desperate rages; the words smelled of despair taken from the heart of trees of sorrow. I sensed the beast all about me as if he had come there and urinated over everything, marking his territory.
I smelled of the beast.
Only then did I understand what my granny had meant when she said I could not escape. She had not meant the beast would follow me, but that he was already everywhere. I had a wife and a child and friends when the beast slipped into me, and before he was done, I had lost them all. I did not care until he withdrew from me, leaving me limp and flaccid. Utterly spent.
For some days rain blurs the window like tears, and I do not bother to rise, knowing the boy will be kept in. But when the sun comes up again, I shuffle to the window and peer out in hope and dread. The boy is on the step, shining like a star, and there is an ominous thudding at my temples.
The young woman comes creeping along the street now, and she is almost on top of the boy before she seems to see him. Maybe she is on drugs. The boy asks something and her lips move. Perhaps she is saying: What are you doing out so early? or Why do you shine?
She points to the apartment above hers. That is where the beast lives, she is saying.
I can almost hear her words.
That is where the slayer of children and babies dwells. That is the blackener of women’s eyes, the lip-splitter and wielder of lit cigarette butts. That is the dealer in broken arms and jaws and necks. That is the king of the bullies and brutes. That is where the lover of pain and bullets hides.
The boy shakes his head, and he turns to face my window.
He points to me. His eyes are like searchlights, fearless and innocent. There is the beast. Up there, he says. He is watching us now.
I start back from his terrible brightness, shivering with terror and hope, for perhaps at the uttermost end of all things, there is hope. If one can come who will see the beast and name it, perhaps it may be defied and driven back.
THE LEMMING FACTOR
The music trilled and fluted, at once wooing and commanding, imperious and intoxicating. The notes were faint, but Sim strained his ears to catch the edge of each one. The tune reminded him of the smell of hot buttercups, of greengrass and the milky mothersmell of his blinddays. It reminded him of the first time he had held his baby brother against his chest. It reminded him of dusk when the light was so beautiful; it ached his throat.
He let the music possess him and fill him up with memories and dreams, because it stopped him thinking.
‘I am so tired,’ Rill said softly.
Sim gave the youngling a startled look, for Rill might as well have stolen the words out of his own head. Neither Rill nor his older sisterblood noticed Sim watching them.
‘I am tired, too, Rill,’ Kora responded softly. ‘But we must keep going, for see how far behind we have fallen. What will happen if the song fades before we reach the end of the road?’
What indeed? Sim thought, but he could not make himself believe it would come to that. It had been promised that the second piping would gather up those who had been left behind in the first great exodus.
To be slow was not to doubt the Piper. It was not lack of faith.
Of course, Sim had not always believed in the Piper, though it shamed him to admit it. There was no proof he existed. Nothing tangible. Just rambling memories and half stories, passed on through generations, of the first time the Piper had summoned their people to the road. Then, it was said, he had walked before them, tall in a coat of many colours, a long silver pipe held between his fingers and set to his lips. He had led them, piping all the while, working his ancient magic to bring together road and land and Great Blue above, so that they might cross to Evermore.
‘But how do we know it is true?’ Sim had asked when he had grown old enough to understand the gaps in the old stories. ‘I mean, if all of our people went with the Piper to Evermore, why are some of us here still?’
Not all had gone, he had been told sadly. The sick and the halt and some mams fearing for their younglings had stopped their ears with wads of grass and stayed behind. Some had stayed out of doubt and others out of fear of discovering nothing, for it was said those who set their paws upon the road were bound to it forever. Without the Piper’s magic to bring together earth and the Great Blue, the road ran on endlessly.
Someone else told him everyone had taken to the road when the Piper piped, for his music had been irresistible, not just a command but a wooing. But many had fallen by the way, for the road was a test – long and hard, requiring endurance and faith. No one had been allowed time to rest and there had been no water and very little food along the way. Some had given up and turned back. It was said by all that the magic required to bring the road to the Great Blue, so they could cross, drained the land and the Piper himself so that the road could only be held together for a certain time. Hence the fear of falling behind, that they would miss the way to Evermore and be bound to the road for eternity.
There was another story that said the earth was not bound to the Great Blue, but that the Piper had spun a bridge of sunlight and water between one and the other. The bridge had been all but transparent. When the moment came, some could not bring themselves to step onto it. Others missed out when they arrived too late, for the bridge lasted only as long as the last note held.
‘When you see the bridge of colour and light in the sky, it is the Piper’s sign that he will return for those of us who failed the first time. It is his promise, written in the Great Blue.’
Sim had heard all the stories.
‘How do you know he will come again?’ he had asked his mam before she died.
She h
ad smiled a weary smile. ‘He left one behind – the Prophet – who travelled among the ones who had not gone and told us what the Piper had told him: that he would not ever come again, but that he would send his song to bring us to the place where the land will meet with the Great Blue. And a way will open to Evermore where there is no hunger or sickness or fear or pain, and where there will be a celebration to end all celebrations, as our people are reunited with the Ones Who Went Before.’
His mam had died that night, and he had wept and hoped she had found her way to Evermore, for he had then believed that death was the only real way to go beyond the Great Blue. He had believed that, right up to the moment the Song swelled into the air, filling his veins and his sinews with sweet fire.
That had been many days ago. Days beyond counting. Days and nights of running and stumbling and of the song woven into the air, calling and pulling at his soul. At all of their souls. Even poor Sorah with his crippled paw. And Kora whose face Sim’s eyes had been resting on at that very moment, and who seemed to change before his eyes. The hard aggression and the ambition had dissolved into a kind of light that reminded him of the milky dusks where everything was uncertain and half-formed, fraught with possibilities.
Sim stole another look at her, knowing that whatever she said to comfort Rill, she was not tired. The pace was nothing to Kora the Bold, who could have been running alongside the other frontrunners. Would have been, except that her mam had died of the bloat only two days before the song swelled on the winds, summoning them all to the road. That had left Kora responsible for her four little brothers: Rill, Mif, Lekkie and silent, solemn little Floret, just out of his blinddays.
It was hard to know who to pity more – the mam for missing the pilgrimage to the Great Blue, or Kora, saddled with the younglings. She could have left them to fend for themselves. The old Kora would have. She was big and strong and athletic, and she had run further and faster than most. When the Piper called, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that she would be one of the first to reach the Great Blue – maybe even the Firstcomer, who it was said would sit at the right hand of the Piper at the celebration in Evermore.
Her decision to pace her brothers was received with incredulity, for it meant sacrificing her chance to be the first. A lot of the others thought Kora a fool, and had said so loudly, as if personally affronted by her decision. She might have made someone else stay back with her little brothers, they said. No one would have blamed her. After all, everyone was supposed to run their own race.
But Kora had run along with the little ones, chivvying them and encouraging them, falling further and further behind.
Sim wondered if she regretted her decision now.
It was different for him. Even if he had not been pacing Sorah, he would never have been near the front. In the ritual runs which he now understood were training for the greatest run of all, he had never managed to be anywhere near the front. His mind would begin to drift and before he knew it, he would be running with the stragglers. The elders called him a lazy dreamer who ought to have run harder.
‘He does not put his heart into the run; the Piper knows,’ his da had once sighed to his mam in Sim’s hearing.
Even now, it was all the same to him if he was last or nearly last. Surely all that really mattered was getting there, and he would not leave Sorah to limp last and all alone.
Any more than Kora would leave Floret.
Sim had always been more than a little awed by Kora before this. She had never so much as looked at him, of course, and that had been as it should be. Each according to their place in the race, each to run the best they can.
But in choosing not to run the best race she could, Kora had made herself into something different. He was not the only one who thought it. The day the exodus began, a fight had nearly broken out when one of Kora’s rivals said loudly that she ought not to be allowed to come. That had ended when Kora hunched her shoulders, and snarled the traditional prelude to a challenge. The other had started back in alarm and lifted her head in submission.
Kora had turned her back insultingly, as if her rival’s life was nothing.
She was still formidable, though now streaked with sweat and road dust, but something had changed. Ordinarily as things went, Sim would not even have dared think of Kora for fear the Piper might strike him dead on the spot for his insolence. But her deliberate slowish lope and her gentleness with her brothers separated her from the haughty frontrunners who had only days before been her comrades.
He wondered how she felt about the Piper finally sending the song of summoning so soon after her mam died and before her little brothers were old enough to fend for themselves. A month more would have done it, yet she had never railed at her fate and even now, when the stragglers were falling further and further behind, her face gave nothing of her thoughts away.
‘If the music stops,’ Lekkie was saying now to Floret, ‘we will have to run and run forever until we fall on the road and die and maggots come to gnaw at our innards and big birds with knife-beaks come to peck our eyes out . . .’
‘That is enough,’ Kora said sharply. ‘There is no need to frighten him.’
‘But if he is afraid he will run faster . . .’
‘No,’ Kora said sternly, and Lekkie fell silent.
Sorah stumbled, and, reaching to steady him, Sim noted with a pang that the limp had grown worse. ‘We ought to stop so that you can rest that for a bit.’
Sorah shook his head, not saying what they both knew. No one rested until the road reached up and touched the Great Blue. The stragglers had fallen behind in a little clump, and there was a widening gap between them and the tail end of the main group. The road was completely covered by the swarm of pilgrims. So many millions of them – a stream of life running ahead as far as the eye could see, all grown out of those few left behind.
‘May the Piper pipe forever,’ Sim whispered reverently.
By the time night fell, Sorah’s limp had grown much worse, and two others had fallen back with them. Liff, and his mate, fat jolly Wirun who had lived in a burrow near Sim’s mam and da for as long as he could recall. In his youth, Liff had been one of the elite frontrunners. But now the endless running and the steep hills were taking their toll.
‘Is the Great Blue the sky?’ inquisitive Mif asked Kora, again calling Sim’s eyes to her.
‘It is, but when the road brings us to it, it will be more than that too,’ she said. ‘The Great Blue is where this world dissolves and becomes something new. It is where all dreams come from, and beyond the dreams is Evermore.’
‘Mila told me that there was no such thing as Evermore,’ Mif said.
‘Mila said there was no Piper either, a little while ago. And now she runs as eagerly as any other.’
So do I, Sim thought wryly.
Sorah stumbled and righted himself again before Sim could help. He felt guilty because he ought to have been watching instead of dreaming.
‘We must go faster,’ Liff wheezed. ‘The song grows fainter.’
In the moonlight, Sim saw Kora exchange a look with Wirun.
‘As the Piper wills, so plays the song,’ Wirun said at last. ‘The run is a test and maybe getting to the end first is not the main thing.’
Liff gave her a disgusted look.
‘Did the Piper make the road?’ Rill asked, his eyes as dark and shiny as wet black stones.
‘I do not know,’ Kora said shortly.
‘The Piper made everything,’ Liff said sternly. ‘He is all powerful.’
‘Then why didn’t he take everyone the first time? Why didn’t he just wait?’ Lekkie asked, shifting his pace so that he could trot along beside Liff and Wirun.
‘The Piper plays as long as he can and it is up to us to hear and run the best we can,’ Wirun said. ‘If you run your best, no matter how slow, the song will not end until the road does. But the Piper knows what is in your heart. If you do not give your best the road will never end, though the song will.?
??
‘Why can’t we just rest a little?’ Mif whined.
‘We must run when the Piper calls,’ Kora said in a tone of voice that wanted an end to the conversation if nothing else.
Sim’s lips twitched but his amusement evaporated when Kora gave him a hard stare, almost as if she had felt his thoughts.
‘How much longer?’ Rill asked as the long night wore on. Now the land either side of the road fell into deep misty hollows, rocky and steepsided. The air felt clear and thin, and it seemed they were climbing steadily.
Liff hissed in disapproval and increased his pace.
‘You must not ask that,’ said Kora.
‘Now the Piper will punish all of us!’ Mif wailed, sounding on the edge of hysteria. ‘The music will stop.’
‘At least we would be able to stop if the music did,’ Lekkie said with some asperity.
‘Kora!’ Mif shrieked. ‘Make them stop.’
‘Shh,’ Kora said. ‘Shh. Crying out like that is sure to make the Piper stop if nothing else does.’
Mif gulped down a sob.
‘The Piper hates us,’ Rill said.
There was an astounded silence, and Sim felt Liff’s fury radiate back towards them. He had drawn some way ahead now, driven by outrage and fear of being tainted by the heresy of little ones. Wirun laboured along behind him, heaving.
‘He loves us and that is why he sent his song,’ Kora said, but absently, as if her mind was elsewhere.
‘Then why does he make us run and run? Mam would never make us run so.’
‘Hush,’ Kora said. ‘Mam will be waiting in Evermore for us.’
Dawn flushed the sky with rose and violet streaks, and Sorah stumbled twice. There was a small sobbing sound in his throat as Sim came up beside him. In the night, the main body of the exodus had drawn out of sight and even Liff and Wirun had gone over the crest of a high hill rising up before them. Beyond this hill lay one even higher, and they could see the road, gleaming and empty. Sim felt a stab of fear at the realisation they had fallen so far behind.