The Fire Sermon Page 13

  The moon was slim, so it was hard work to pick our way through the marsh to the settlement, and several times one or both of us ended up knee-deep in water. Hunger had put an end to any qualms about stealing from Omegas, but as we drew closer, the ramshackle buildings and the fetid smell of the sodden fields surrounding them suggested there’d be little to steal. But it was the music that I wanted to take. We crept through the patchy fields until the buildings began. The noise was coming from the barn on the south side of the hill. It was brightly lit by hanging lanterns, and through the open door we could see figures, some seated on hay bales, others dancing to the tune.

  Since this was an Omega settlement, at least we knew that there would be no dogs to reveal us as we crept around to the back of the barn. The music was loud there, and the rough beamed wall was generous with cracks through which we could peer inside. The lanterns seemed to flicker in time with the music. In the center of the barn, on a makeshift stage of hay bales, two men played pipes while a woman played a guitar. They were traveling bards, by the look of them, their clothes both ornate and road-worn. Their visit was probably an excuse for this threadbare party. Around them milled the locals, thin but merry enough, and some of them drunk already, reeling to the music.

  “Come away,” said Kip, pulling at my elbow.

  “They won’t be able to see us—not with the barn lit up like that,” I whispered, keeping my face pressed to the rough wood. Inside, a man was spinning a young girl by her arms, her single foot lifting from the ground as she orbited him, laughing loudly.

  “It’s not that.”

  I turned. He stepped back, gave a half bow, and held out his arm again.

  “Dance?”

  I stifled a laugh at the absurdity of it. But he met my grin with one of his own. “Just for a few minutes, let’s pretend we’re not fugitives. Let’s just be two people at a dance.”

  He must have known, as much as I did, how impossible it was. At any minute we could be exposed. Even here, among our own kind, we dared not show ourselves. Word might have spread from Wyndham, if not from the village where we’d stolen the horses. There were soldiers after us, and a bounty, probably, which the bony faces inside the barn would find hard to resist. And somewhere the Confessor was out there, too, her blade-mind rasping the night sky.

  In the dark, though, with the music leaking through the gaps in the barn wall, and with the smell of smoke and ale, it was easy just to take his hand. The light from the barn painted bars on his face. Taking his arm, I rested my other hand on his side, and we swayed to the music. For a few moments, it was like a glimpse into another life: one in which we might be inside the barn, dancing with friends, instead of hiding outside in the dark. One in which our worries might be a poor harvest, or a leaky roof, instead of a chamber full of tanks, and a pursuing army. Where my sleep might be interrupted by dreams of a handsome boy I’d seen at market, instead of by visions of the blast.

  We stayed there for several songs. A jig came on and we spun each other about, making up extravagant moves as we went. We didn’t dare laugh, or even talk, but the dancers on the other side of the wall did it for us, their calls and giggles growing louder with the music.

  A light rain began. It was warm enough not to matter, and we were part-soaked anyway from crossing the marsh, but it was a reminder that we were on the wrong side of the wall. That we were stealing time from a life that wasn’t our own. Perhaps that was what I’d been doing for all those years, back in the village when Zach and I were children.

  We didn’t speak as we crept off into the night, followed by the music, and made our way back across the tussocked swamp.

  As the days passed, we grew to envy the horses’ constant feast of grass. On the marshes there was little for us to scavenge. The murky ponds yielded nothing but a few small shrimps, all fleshless shell. At least there was always water, and the inhospitable, swampy ground meant that we traveled for days without encountering a settlement. This was a relief, but it also meant there was no food to steal. Kip made fewer jokes. At night, as we sat together watching the horses chew, I caught myself mimicking their chewing motion with my own empty mouth.

  “Don’t you ever wonder why horses don’t have twins?” I said, as we watched them graze nearby. “Other animals, either.”

  “They do sometimes,” he said.

  “Oh, they have multiple births sometimes, but not proper twins. Not linked.”

  He shrugged. “Animals don’t talk or build houses, either,” he pointed out. “They’re different from us. The blast, the radiation, it affected humans differently, that’s all. It’s not like it didn’t affect animals, too—you see deformed animals all the time. They just adapted in different ways.”

  I nodded. That was the accepted explanation, though it was hard to think of twins as an adaptation rather than as eternal. A world without twins seemed unnatural, impossible. Perhaps Kip was as close to such a thing as the After would allow. But even that was an illusion. He might not remember her, but his twin was out there, somewhere. They were like the two-headed snake we’d spotted by the river, a week before. Each head might imagine itself autonomous, but they had only one death to share.

  The next day, I felt the swamp receding. Then the tangible signs began to show: the ground beneath the horses became less marshy, and we made better progress. To the west, we could make out a body of mountains. Then, toward the evening, smoke rose ahead.

  When we’d slipped the ropes from the horses’ necks, it took them some time to realize they were free. They began to graze where they stood. I laughed. “Wouldn’t that just be our luck, if we couldn’t shake them now?” Still I didn’t walk away, allowed myself one last pat of my horse’s neck.

  “Do you think they’ll be all right?”

  I nodded. “They’ll probably be caught again, eventually. And until then, it’ll be like a holiday.” I stepped back; when the horse still didn’t move, I leaned forward again and gave it a firm smack on the side. It took a few experimental steps away. Kip’s horse followed. Then, barely twenty feet away, they resumed their grazing.

  “I sort of thought they’d gallop off into the distance.”

  Kip shrugged. “Too lazy. I haven’t seen them gallop since that first night.” He held up the ropes. “Do we need these?”

  “I can’t see why.” We left them where they fell.

  Kip looked at me. “You’re going to miss the horses, aren’t you?”

  “Kind of. Some things, anyway.”

  “Me too. I liked riding, liked having them around.” He began walking. “If it’s any consolation, we’ll probably smell like them for a long time yet.”

  We sat on a large boulder near the edge of the marsh, watching the network of roads visible in the distance, converging at a town. It was big, larger than anything I’d seen apart from Wyndham. The town seemed to spill down the hill, houses scattered farther apart at the outskirts, with those higher up clustering tightly. From near the southern side of the town, a forest spread thickly into the distance, as far as we could see.

  “Omega,” I said, eyes squinting against the sun setting low behind the city.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just look at it.” I gestured to the makeshift buildings, the marshy land around. Some of the houses at the edge of town were barely shacks.

  “There’ll be some Alphas there, too, though.”

  “Perhaps a few patrols of soldiers. Some traders or travelers, too, maybe. Shady types.”

  “Will they be watching for us here?”

  I sucked my top lip. “I don’t know. We’ve come a long way—probably farther than Zach thought we’d get.”

  “Farther than I thought we’d get, to be honest.”

  “Even so, he will have sent word out. I don’t think we have a choice, though.” I looked down at my bony arms. On my hands, my knuckles stood out, sharp as fins. “We can’t keep going like this. Even if they’re looking for us, the town’s still got to be our best chance to
find food.” I thought, too, of how I had hidden my doll Scarlett in full sight, among the other dolls in the toy chest, when Zach had tried to take her. “We might be safest in the town anyway. There, we’d be just two among thousands.”

  Kip turned to me. “And they’re going to be looking for a seer and a one-armed boy, right?”

  chapter 13

  On Kip’s suggestion, we used my sweater to bind my left arm tightly around my body. After the weeks of hunger, and with Kip’s sweater baggy over the top, the concealed arm was barely visible, folded across my stomach. Kip’s appearance was harder to change. We tried stuffing his empty left sleeve with grass, thinking that he might fake a limp instead, but his scarecrow arm looked ridiculous. “Anyway,” he said, “there’ll be hundreds of one-armed men in the city. You’re the problem.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I knew what he meant. Seers were rare—the Confessor and the mad seer at Haven were the only others I’d seen in person, though I’d heard of others. Here, my body would be as anomalous as Kip’s in an Alpha town.

  Neither of us mentioned the other obvious precaution we should take, of separating. For me, off-balance and awkward with one arm bound, the idea of being alone in the town was too much. As we walked together toward the main road, I stumbled several times and Kip steadied me.

  “You shouldn’t use your real name, either,” he said.

  “Good idea.” I thought for a moment. “I’ll be Alice. And you?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh. Of course,” I said, laughing. In those few weeks I’d become so used to thinking of him as Kip that I’d forgotten I’d named him myself.

  The city crept up on us. There were others on the road, mostly heading toward the town as the evening darkened. A man pulled a barrow loaded with pumpkins. A woman carried a bale of cloth over her shoulder. But nobody glanced at us—we were just part of the town’s tide, being drawn back in with the night.

  We reached the main part of town, where buildings crowded tightly over narrow streets. I’d thought the grime of the past few weeks would make us stand out, but many of the people jostling past were nearly as dirty as us.

  I tugged at Kip’s sweater. “This way,” I said, gesturing up a side street.

  “Are you doing the magic geography thing again?”

  I laughed. “No—but I can smell food.” And the square that the street opened up to was indeed the market. At this hour, though, all that remained was the smell—a reminder of pastry, of overripe vegetables—and a scattering of cabbage leaves trodden into the mud. The last stallholders were sealing up their wares in barrows and leaving.

  “Sorry—too late, I guess. Not that we have money, anyway.”

  “We should have eaten one of the horses.” He was only partly joking.

  “So we look for work.”

  “Or steal, if we can,” he said, watching a stallholder wheel away a crate of pies.

  “I don’t know. We can’t just gallop away on horseback this time. And it feels worse, somehow, stealing from our own people.”

  “What happened to there’s only one world?” he teased. “No—I know what you mean. I’d rather work. I just don’t know what work we’re fit for, that’s all.”

  Two men were crossing the market square toward us. One of them, a fat man leaning on a cane, paused by us, then bent in so close that I could smell his hot, sweet breath. He turned to Kip.

  “A bronze coin for you, lad, if you’ll let me take care of your pretty friend for an hour.”

  Before Kip had a chance to reply, I struck the man across the face. The stubble on his chin was so coarse that it prickled the palm of my hand. I ran, looking back at Kip, who kicked the man’s cane from under him before following me. But the fat man made no attempt to chase us. We could hear him give a loud curse, and then a whistle, his friend laughing noisily. I couldn’t run well with my arm strapped across my torso, and as soon as we’d escaped the market square Kip pulled me into the cover of a doorway.

  “I thought we were trying to be inconspicuous,” he hissed.

  “You think I should have gone with him?”

  “No—of course not. But we could just walk away. You don’t need to start a fight, bring attention to us.”

  I kicked the earth at my feet. “He was disgusting.”

  “Of course he was. But he won’t be the last bad person we come across, and we need to stay out of trouble.” I said nothing. “At least let him give me the money next time, before we make a run for it,” he said.

  I had to turn my whole body to slap his shoulder with my free arm.

  We continued up the alley, which made its way uphill. Behind shutters we could glimpse the light of fires and lamps. Where the alley joined a larger street we were again surrounded by people, but after our encounter at the marketplace, I was less comforted by the crowd. The man had been the first person to speak to us since our escape, I realized, unless you counted the shouts of the Alpha villagers when we stole the horses. I hadn’t thought much about how we would fit back into the world. Here, in the city’s lively streets, we were still hungry, still pursued. The smells of food, drifting out from various houses, only made it harder. We saw no Council soldiers, at least, although on some of the walls, their posters were nailed: Council Soldiers: Protecting Your Communities. Refuges: Your Council Caring for You. Tithe Dodging: Punishable by Imprisonment. Report Illegal Omega Schools (Reward Offered). This last one made us both grin, at the Council’s use of written warnings in a town whose inhabitants they would claim were illiterate. We noticed, too, that some of the posters had been crudely defaced. Others had been torn down, leaving only wistful shreds of paper hanging from the nails.

  A large building dominated the downhill side of the street, its window shutters thrown open and smoke rising from the chimney. From a bracket by the door a lamp swung, and below it a woman sat on an upturned bucket, smoking a pipe. I looked at Kip, who nodded, and followed me.

  “Excuse me, please,” I said. The woman didn’t speak but replied with a puff of smoke from the pipe. “Do you run the inn? And do you think we might work, in exchange for some food and lodging? Just for one night?”

  The woman again seemed to signal her assent with a generous puff of smoke. I tried hard not to cough. Then she stood, removed her pipe, and stepped back on her awkwardly bowed legs, making room in the doorway for us to enter. “It’s not an inn,” she said, “but I do run the place, and I reckon we can use you.”

  We thanked her as we stepped inside. Despite her crooked legs, she moved quickly. The low-ceilinged hall was lit by candles, but almost immediately the woman kicked open a door into a side room, and ushered us in.

  “Go on then. Get your clothes off, both of you.”

  This time it was Kip who stepped forward. “Not that kind of work. I’m sorry, we misunderstood.”

  The woman just laughed as he tried to shoulder past her, his hand in mine. “Don’t be daft. This isn’t a whorehouse. But if you think you’re going near my kitchen in that state, you’ve indeed misunderstood. Now get in there and my cook will bring you some water.”

  The door swung shut behind her. Kip looked at me. “It’s not locked. We could leave.”

  I shook my head. “I think she’s all right. It feels all right, I mean, this place.”

  “But you don’t know what it is?”

  I shook my head. “As long as they feed us, I almost don’t care.”

  We heard a shouted order beyond the door, and only minutes later a young woman in a red headscarf came in with a bucket and emptied it into the round wooden tub that stood by the fire. She made three more trips, throwing Kip a bar of soap the final time she entered. “The boss said you’d be needing this, and by the looks of the two of you, she’s right.”

  The prospect of a proper clean was too enticing for us to wait for the water to warm fully. Kip gave me the soap and sat pointedly with his back to the tub while I undressed and stepped into the lukewarm water. It was deep enough tha
t if I tucked my knees to my chest and lay back I could get my whole head underwater. Surfacing, I lay for a few moments, but my sharp bones were painful where they jabbed the tub, so I set about washing myself. The soap didn’t lather well in the tepid water, but I scrubbed until my skin, cleansed of its layers of grime, looked unfamiliar, and weirdly pink. I scrubbed my hair, too, until it squeaked under my hands.

  The door was pushed open again, and I banged my head as I curled low in the tub to hide myself, but the girl didn’t enter this time, simply flung two towels and a bundle of clothes and let the door slam.

  “Can you pass me a towel?” I gave a stifled laugh at Kip as he politely sidestepped to the towel, then sidestepped back, keeping his back to me even as he tossed the towel my way.

  “Oh for goodness’ sake. You’re not the one I have to hide my body from,” I said, stepping out and wrapping myself in the towel. “You know I’ve got both arms. And I can’t imagine the rest of me is any great surprise.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered, but kept his eyes averted while I rifled through the clean clothes the girl had left us. When I had on a shirt and trousers I had to ask him for his help to bind my arm again, which we did with my old shirt, before concealing it with a thick sweater.

  Kip picked up the second towel, stepped over and looked into the tub.

  “I’m sorry it’s so grotty,” I said, embarrassed. “But at least it will have warmed up a bit more by now.”

  Despite my earlier teasing, I did as he’d done and kept my back turned while he undressed and bathed. The sounds alone were oddly intimate, though. I could hear every splash, every reverberation of the tub against his elbow and shoulder blades. Then the sounds of the towel rasping on his skin, of clothes being drawn over his body.