The Fire Sermon Read online

  “I know. But it’s a different world that they live in.”

  “You sound like Zach.”

  “I don’t think he and I have much in common.”

  “Maybe not. But what you said about a different world—that’s his sort of talk. All that stuff about separation that the Alphas go on about.”

  “It’s a fact. Look down there—do you see any deformities, any brands? Each of those children has a twin, and their parents sent them away. And your Alpha family didn’t have much time for you in their world, as I recall.”

  I looked away. “There’s only one world.”

  Kip gestured toward the village. “You want to walk over there, introduce yourself, and try to explain that to them, be my guest.”

  The men and women trailed back from the barn as the darkness mounted. A woman and a boy were hanging out clothes and sheets on a line by the well. Later a cart loaded with logs, pulled by two brown horses, approached from a road that led off to the east. Kip nudged me. A man sat at the front of the cart, and as it neared the village he jumped down and led the horses. A girl ran to greet him, and together they unhitched the wagon. I watched carefully, struck by how calmly they handled the huge animals. It was the girl, alone, who led both horses into the stable, the man giving the larger beast a gentle smack on the haunch as it was led away.

  Some time later, the girl emerged and went into the house nearest the stable. The other children had dispersed, too, now, and the noises of the village were muffled as the people retreated indoors. I felt vaguely guilty watching them, oblivious, go about their lives. Smoke began to unfurl from one or two chimneys.

  Kip was impatient, but I made him wait until the dark was fully settled, the lamplights in the windows extinguished. Since we escaped we’d been grateful for the fine weather, but as we finally emerged from the shelter of the trees, I wished we had the cover of rain or fog.

  On the way past the well we had to bend beneath the washing line, loaded with sheets and clothes. I felt a tug on my shirt and turned to see Kip gesturing at the clothes.

  “Steal them?” I mouthed.

  “We’re taking their horses. I don’t think a pair of trousers is going to make a difference.” In the sleeping village, his whisper sounded loud to me.

  I grimaced. “We need the horses.”

  “You’re not the one who’s been wearing a makeshift skirt for the last two weeks. I’ll stick out, wherever we go.”

  “Fine. But be quick.” I jerked my head toward the stables. “Meet me in there.”

  In the stable, it took time for my eyes to get used to the darkness, and when they did I was struck again by the sheer size of the horses, black masses in the dark. They were standing in two separate stalls, making noises that were alien to me: a snorting and shifting of weight. Bridles hung on the wall, and saddles were mounted on a low beam by the door, but the straps and buckles looked unfathomable, so instead I grabbed two decent lengths of rope that were looped on a nail by the door. I approached the smaller horse first. It moved backward as I reached the front of its enclosure, and I winced at the clunk of its hoof on the back wall. Then it stepped forward, and I was pushed to the left by its head, lowered over the stall door, rubbing against my side. I stifled a shout when the horse nipped at my hip, but when I stumbled back, my hand to where I’d been bitten, I felt the apples crammed in my pocket. I breathed out slowly. When I stepped forward again, a shriveled apple in my outstretched hand, the horse took it with no hint of teeth. The softness of its lips on my palm was unexpected. While the horse chewed, I reached the rope slowly around its neck, looped it, and then, recalling the man with the cart, gave a firm pat on its shoulder, hoping to communicate an authority I didn’t feel.

  With the second horse, it was easier. By the time I’d got a second apple out of my pocket he was eager for it, and he submitted to having his neck stroked while he chewed noisily.

  It took me a few seconds to work out how to open the stall doors, and to manage it while keeping hold of both ropes. I’d thought the horses might dash forward, but they seemed unenthusiastic, and followed me only after much tugging, and another apple brandished beyond their reach. The larger horse sighed in a way that reminded me of Kip whenever I woke him at the start of a day.

  Leading them from their stalls, I remembered the sound of hooves clattering on the shale of the cave when Kip and I escaped, and braced myself for noise, but the ground was soft and thickly scattered with hay, subduing the hoof falls.

  When I led the horses outside, the figure waiting in the darkness startled me for an instant, before I recognized Kip under unfamiliar clothes. He watched as both horses followed me obediently.

  “Is that one of your seer things?” he asked. “Can you communicate with them?”

  “Don’t be daft,” I snorted. “I gave them each an apple.” I handed him the rope of the larger horse.

  “Shouldn’t we have saddles and things?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “There’s no pleasing some people. Come on.”

  “I even scored shoes,” he said, holding out a leg for me to admire his mud-encrusted boots. “Left outside the door of the big house. Not the best fit, but I didn’t feel like knocking on the door to ask if they had a bigger size.”

  We were in the small green between the stables and the well. A low wall ran along one side, so I led my horse near it and stepped up onto the wall.

  “You said you know which way is forward, right?” said Kip, watching me as his own horse busied itself happily with the grass.

  “Shut up,” I said, hoisting myself up. I got my arms more or less around the horse’s warm neck, and after a few ungainly swings managed to get my leg over the back. The horse gave a sulky whinny. The other horse snatched its head up and echoed the sound. Kip tried to tug it closer to the wall, but it wrenched the rope from his hand, only to stop three feet away and resume its feast of grass.

  Kip seemed a long way below me now. I watched him slowly approach his horse again, pick up the rope, tug more gently this time. The horse grunted, stamped a hoof, but wouldn’t budge within reach of the wall. Kip tried to jump, but without the benefit of the wall’s height he only clawed at the horse’s back and slipped heavily down. The horse started backward, bumping my mount, which started its own frantic dance, neighing loudly. In the house behind us a voice shouted, and a lamp was lit. A man rushed from the front door, his swinging lamp a slash of light in the darkness. From behind him, another man followed, with a flaming torch.

  I’d been wondering how to get the horse moving, but the torch at least solved that problem, startling my horse off in a diagonal skitter across the green. I had to duck low, clinging to the horse’s neck, as it charged under the washing line to take shelter on the far side of the well. But Kip, unmounted and clinging to the rope, was only a dozen feet from the men, now between him and the wall. His horse, like mine, started away from the flaming torch, and Kip was half running, half dragged, to keep up. He was hidden from me now by a huge white sheet on the line, through which the whole scene played out like a shadow play, lit by the torches behind. I saw the two men close in on Kip, heard the shouts of other people from the cottages. “Thieves,” a woman yelled, and then, as more torches lit the scene and Kip became more visible, “Omegas.” Even in silhouette, I could see that the growing crowd was armed: those without torches carried billhooks or sickles. One carried a long rope, looped at the end, and moved purposefully toward Kip. I tried to urge my horse back toward Kip but it only jittered on the spot. The man tossed the noose toward Kip’s horse, but it darted backward as the rope fell just short. As the horse passed close to the well, Kip jumped onto the circular surrounding wall, and from there made a dive at the horse’s back. I heard a clatter from the well as some loosened stones tumbled into the deep. But there was no matching clatter of Kip hitting the ground, and through the white sheet I saw his silhouette, somehow astride the horse. Then the sheet itself was torn from the line and hurtling toward me as Kip raced for
ward, shrouded in fabric and bent low over the horse’s neck.

  There was no way out, though. From every house, it seemed, figures had burst, and the edges of the green were ringed with lanterns and torches. The horses wheeled, backing into one another and skittering in panic. Kip was struggling to free himself of the sheet without releasing his grip on the horse’s mane. The ring of flames tightened around us. A man with a torch darted close. He grabbed at my leg, his grip on my ankle a shackle that kicking could not shake. The heat from his torch scorched my knee.

  Then he was enveloped in the sheet that Kip tossed at him. I kicked out at the grasping shroud of fabric, already aflame. My horse responded as if to a signal, and took off. As I careened toward the torches, the figures holding them were only black outlines, but I saw them loom closer, and then, at the last minute, dive aside, a blur of flame. Behind me, loud as my galloping heartbeat, I could hear the other horse.

  I didn’t dare to turn and check whether Kip was still mounted, could only shout his name. When he replied, over the pounding of hooves, I heard my body answer, a sound that was part sob, part laugh.

  chapter 12

  In those first minutes of frantic galloping, I was afraid that we’d never be able to stop. We soon learned, however, that the horses were fundamentally lazy. After the initial panic had receded, and the lights of the village were no longer visible behind us, the horses slowed, and it was only with repeated kicks that they could be persuaded to move at anything faster than a walk. We rode most of the night in this fashion: bursts of reluctant speed, long periods of walking. I hadn’t imagined how tiring it would be. I’d thought riding would be as simple as sitting, but the effort of just staying on, let alone cajoling the horse forward, made my hips and legs ache. My horse kept stopping to graze and could only be dissuaded by sharp upward tugs on the rope around its neck. When I coaxed it to a faster pace, I was bounced around until I thought my teeth would loosen and fall out.

  I knew, or sensed, that we were still heading southwest, though we’d left the road not long after the village. As the morning began to seep through the darkness, we saw that we’d reached a broad plain, disturbed only by tussocks of longer grass and small ponds. The horses slowed as they picked their way through the swampy ground. For once I didn’t struggle against my horse as it began tearing grass from the soggy earth. Kip drew to a halt beside me and surveyed the flat expanse around us. “If we get off here, we’ll never be able to get back on again.”

  “I’ve got a feeling it’s easier without an angry mob,” I said. “Either way, I don’t think I can stay up much longer.”

  “Do you know how to get down?”

  I shrugged. “Surely that’s the easy bit. I’ve been struggling all night not to fall off.” I could make out a small coppice only a few hundred feet away. “We could sleep there.”

  “Right now, I could sleep anywhere.”

  I swung one leg over to join the other and slid down, stumbling slightly when I landed. My legs protested as I straightened them. Next to me, the horse shook his neck happily. Kip dismounted, too, landing evenly but wincing at his muscles’ ache.

  The horses took some convincing to move again, but after much tugging they swayed back into grudging motion, and before too long we reached the shelter of the small stand of trees. The horses drank from the swampy pond while I tethered their ropes to a branch. Within the huddle of the trees, where the ground rose slightly from the swamp plain, Kip sat on the tufted grass. He gestured to himself with distaste. “I finally get hold of some clothes, lovely clean clothes, and now they reek of horse.”

  “I can’t imagine we smell too great ourselves, these days,” I said. Sitting beside him, I fished out the last two apples from my pockets, passed one to him.

  “How far do you think we’ve come?”

  “A long way. Further than we would have made in days on foot, I think.” I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep the horses all the way to the coast—Omegas on horseback would always be conspicuous—but every day of riding brought us closer to the island.

  He spat out an apple pip. “Far enough that Zach’ll stop looking for us?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not just him, anyway.” All through the night, even with the horse jolting beneath me, I’d felt the Confessor, felt that beam of thought trained on us. “Not that I think he’ll ever stop looking, but it’s her I feel, mainly. The Confessor. And I don’t know why she’d care so much. Why she’d be so concerned about protecting Zach.”

  Beside me, Kip lay back. “She works for him, right?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I mean, she’s an Omega, and he’s on the Council, so yes. But it’s hard to picture her working for anyone, really.” I thought of the imperious arch of the Confessor’s eyebrows.

  Kip sat up. “I forgot—this is yours.” He took off the outer sweater, and then, beneath it, peeled off the sweater I’d lent him that first day. I put it over my shirt. It was filthy, and weirdly misshapen at the neck, from being stretched around his waist for these weeks. I looked down at myself and laughed.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling on his own sweater again. “I guess I ruined it.”

  “My clothes are the least of our worries at the moment, however ridiculous I look.”

  “You don’t look ridiculous. You look beautiful.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact way. I didn’t know what to say, but he was already rolling over to sleep. “Filthy, obviously. And you smell of horse. But beautiful.”

  The horses were a mixed blessing. We could cover ground more quickly than before, but we also felt exposed. Two people on horseback were easier to spot and harder to hide, and two Omegas on horseback would draw attention from anyone we passed, not just the Council’s soldiers. We agreed to keep the horses only for a few days, to cross the marshy plain, then ditch them when we started to encounter habitable land.

  The riding got easier. I figured out that my horse responded better to squeezes from my legs than tugs on the rope around its neck. Mounting was still hard for Kip, with only one arm to haul himself up, but he took quickly to the riding. The unsteadiness that still plagued his movements was lessened on horseback, and he would show off, circling me, shifting smoothly between paces. We made good progress, drawn on always by the enticing sense that we were closer each day to the island. My visions of it were clearer than before, as though it were emerging from the fog of distance. When it came to me in dreams, I could see the black gloss of the mussels clinging to the rocks at the water’s edge, and smell the salt-scoured air, soured with bird droppings.

  My legs still ached from the riding, but I’d grown fond of my horse and often, in the evenings, would stand leaning against its neck, one hand on its shoulder, the other on the soft notch of its nose, between the huge, flaring nostrils. Despite my protestations, Kip could never quite rid himself of the idea that I was communicating psychically with the horses. In fact, it was the opposite that I warmed to, and that I’d found so disarming at first: the horses were so insistently present, in their sheer size and physicality, but not present in the sense that I was used to, that throbbing mental awareness that I felt around other people. When I stood with my face pressed to my horse’s neck, I could close my eyes and imagine this might be what a nonseer would feel when with another person. A simple presence, a warm body. At night, when I slept close to Kip, I wondered if his lack of memories explained why I was able to feel so comfortable with him. Perhaps his mind felt so unobtrusive to mine because his lack of a past meant there was less clamor in his head.

  He didn’t talk often about what had happened to him, but I was surprised at how happy he seemed. The world appeared to hold a kind of novelty for him, and despite the hunger and exhaustion, he was largely cheerful. He tried to explain it to me, one night when we lay huddled close on the grass, the horses tethered nearby.

  “When you broke the tank, it was like the blast. That’s what it feels like. Not in a bad way, but in the way that everything split, right at that moment, into Before
and After. The instant when you smashed the glass. That was the blast, for me, right down to the noise, rushing in. The crashing.”

  I winced as I remembered it. The swing of the wrench; the explosion of sound in the tank room’s hush.

  He continued: “Everything before then, it’s lost to me. Of course it’s sad. And of course I wish I knew. But everything since the smashing of the tank, that’s the After. And I can’t argue with it. It’s what I’ve got. It’s hard to explain, but it’s exciting, in a way. Everything’s new.”

  I sighed. “I could do with a little less excitement, myself.” But I knew what he meant. I also knew the responsibility that I had toward him. I was the tank smasher, the blast maker. I wasn’t sure whether I was the apocalypse of his old world, or the prophet of his new world. Or both. Either way, I knew already that we were bound together, since the moment I swung the wrench into the tank. Perhaps from before then: from the moment his eyes met mine through the glass.

  We passed only one settlement in the marshlands. We saw the hill from a distance, emerging from the swamp, the outline of buildings at its peak, its lower slopes planted with straggling crops. Its forsaken position marked it as an Omega settlement, but we nonetheless skirted widely as the sun set. There were no copses within sight, but half a mile west of the settlement we came across a patch where the reeds towered above the horses, giving good cover, so we stopped there for the night.

  We’d planned to keep our distance and head off before dawn, but the music drew us in. As we were tethering the horses the sound of the pipes came slinking across the marsh. When the wind was low enough we could make out the twang of a guitar as well. It was the first time I’d heard music since my years in the settlement, where Sara the blacksmith used to play the pipes when we’d gather together after harvest, or for the midwinter bonfire. Omega bards, too, passed through our settlement sometimes, though in the last lean years few bards would stop there, when there were no coins to be given and the best they could hope for was a bed for the night and a meager meal. On the marsh with Kip that evening, it had been so long since I’d heard music that the sounds reaching us seemed not just to come out of the darkness but also to come out of the past. Melodies half-heard and half-remembered.