The Bone Wall (22 page)

“No elephants,” Priest admits, his smile breaking through.

“Lions?” I ask, feeling foolish.

“Mountain lions, cougars.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Best avoided,” he suggests.

“Well, then. Not such a senseless question after all.” I return the smile, somewhat relieved to have survived that hurdle. He laughs while I blow out another long breathy sigh.

“There’s something different about you, Angel. More than you realize. You’re from one of the Gardens, aren’t you?” The fire reflects in his eyes as he delves into the mystery of me. I sense his gaze under my skin, as if he peels away my layers to explore what lies at my heart.

“I’m from Heaven,” I reply, meeting his eyes, and he smiles in understanding.

**

After another day in the waste, we veer east. Horse hooves clomp up another ancient road, cracked and crumbling into ragged gullies scratched from the steep slopes by ruthless streams. The remnant of the road ascends steadily through thinning evergreens toward hazy mountains, blue in the distance. Priest and I interrupt our unbroken verbal examination of each other to absorb summer’s stamp upon the land: sapphire skies and blue-gray gnatcatchers, vermillion paintbrush and dainty columbine, refreshing springs bubbling between sun-warmed rocks.

On our third day of travel, as we near our destination, I spot signs of human life: cultivated fields, orchards of young apples and apricots, goats in expanding pastureland, paddocks of sheep, trees hewn to squat stumps to make way for sunlight. Ahead of me, the mountains soar into serrated teeth, the patchy road fading and vanishing into the ground. Priest steers us into the mouth of a canyon, steep walls striped red, black, and gray with history, pocked with blue that he explains is copper, and white he says is salt.

The canyon crawls downward for a distance to a high stone wall and wide wooden gate. Armed men on watch at the wall’s peak wave and shout orders to others below. I hear grinding and thumping, a hissed curse and complaints, apologies and laughter; then the gate squeals open. As we descend the rocky track, we ride through the gaps in two more walls, their portals unmanned, the doors left ajar. After the last wall, the canyon sprawls open, the flat bottom of a stone bowl, wide enough for another orchard and verdant fields in the midst of cultivation, men, women, and children toiling in the sun. My eyes linger on the leafy gardens only a moment, drawn instead to a white flume of water plummeting from the bowl’s rim, plunging for hundreds of sparkling feet. It slams with a humming roar into a wheel that spins in a blurry, whirling frenzy, spraying a cloud of mist to the sunlight. I gasp at the sight and close my speechless, gaping mouth.

“It’s easy to forget how beautiful it is,” Priest says behind me. “I see it for the first time through every new set of eyes.” At the bottom of the falls, a stream too small for all that power snakes across the fields and through a cleft in the bowl. “There’s another fall right through there.” He points. “But only birds use that path.”

“This place is a fortress.”

“In some ways,” he agrees. “But our power lies in this.” He holds up his stunted right arm.

“Your magic?”

“You’ll see.”

In two places along the cliff walls, enormous arched alcoves carve the sandstone face. Sheltered beneath the lofty rock ceilings, blocky buildings and towers nestle in dense clusters, a labyrinth built of the same pale, pink rock as the cliffs. Stone stairs traverse the structures’ outer walls with wooden ladders resting against the highest windows, open to the day without shutters or glass. The buildings outside the colossal gashes in the wall are weathered wood and rusty metal, jumbled together against the sheer wall as if constructed in haste. Elsewhere, I see small huts of stacked logs with roofs of layered wood shingles. A score of horses grazes in tufted patches of grass beside several fenced paddocks; pigs squeal in a muddy pen. “How many live here?” I ask.

“All told, close to nine hundred, most inside the canyon though our farms expand outside the walls.”

My next question slips away as Priest dismounts and offers his hand to help me down. I hurry to the travois, my sister’s eyes open, staring blankly at the falls. “This is the Colony,” I tell her, my hand over hers. She can’t reply with more than garbled growls, so she speaks nothing. A single tear slides from the corner of her lashes.

“Let’s bring her inside,” Priest says as Tannis and Chantri help her to her feet. Tannis picks her up, cradling her as Chantri tucks the cloak around her bruised body. We climb the narrow stairs, my eyes scaling the plain-faced stone to the soaring arch overhead, a dome so unlike Heaven. Priest holds open a wooden door and waves us through.

Behind the door, I step into a stone chamber, muted daylight from the single window enhanced by glowing filaments hung from overhead beams and peeking down passageways into deeper rooms. The space feels cool but warms as we enter. The light changes, seeming to bend around a corner ahead of us, showing us the way with beads of color, rainbows drifting on the walls. As I follow Tannis, I hear voiceless melodies, a tapestry of sounds weaving together. I smell bread and scents of lavender. When I turn to face Priest, bursting with questions, he smiles and the sensory aura fades, except for the doughy fragrance of fresh baked bread and the white filaments casting their soft glow on sandstone walls.

The stone city is a warren of alleyways and levels, interior passages and low ceilinged rooms extending deep into the smooth stone of the cliff. I follow, lost but unconcerned. We pass people in our journey, a vast spectrum of human life I can scarcely describe. What is healthy and normal is no longer in my power to define, no longer something I can measure with my eyes. Misshapen faces offer me smiles; fingerless hands bring me food. In a small room that Rimma and I will share, three young women so like Glory fetch me buckets of water that they warm without fire, so I can finally wash the blood from my sister’s battered body. Carefully, I untwist the beaded wires from our ears.

**

While Rimma heals in our room, I’m a woman of form, seen and heard among the people of the Colony. I don’t understand my “magic,” how I fade in and out of vision, how some see me always and others only in snatches of time, only when I’m without Rimma, as if her power overwhelms my very existence. Those with some knowledge of magic say with certainty that I’m not a light-bender, but perhaps light curves around me without my effort, directed by another or in a trick of the broken world that leaves me unseen.

Through the high sun of summer, I labor in the fields, work I’m accustomed to from my life in Heaven. The sun roasts me, my skin pink in a matter of minutes, flaring with blisters if I don’t cover up. After my first sunburn, Kya presented me with an enormous hat, woven of grass, flopping over my shoulders. She smiles, all toothless and gangly with her swayed back and long deft fingers, the lilt of melody breathing into the space between us. Despite the silliness of my flappy headwear, I wear it every day the sun brightens a cloudless sky.

So few of us are physically capable of accomplishing the heavy work of our sustenance. Magic keeps us warm and well lit, but it doesn’t oblige food to grow or pluck weeds or milk goats. And it doesn’t heal the wasting illnesses and pain afflicted by the broken world. Not unlike the packs, lives here are brief compared to Heaven and hard fought; the only mercy that which we grant each other. We are tired, poor, and threadbare, sometimes a swallow hungry after the last crumbs vanish, scraping a meager living from the dirt and setting aside stores for winter. Yet despite the hardships, I belong here; I feel the presence of God here as I never felt in Heaven. I witness the presence of God in each face I encounter.

Twilight lingers in the canyon, the sun’s cheery face a brief visitor between our towering walls. Priest finds me at dusk as he often does, knee-deep in red-veined greens, soil blackening my arms to the elbows. He helps me finish harvesting leaves from the row, the time passing in idle chatter, and then sits on the stream’s bank while I wash the clinging traces of dirt from my arms and pick stubborn grit from my fingernails. I sink down beside him, listening to crickets, my favorite time of day, my favorite company. He’s a steady influence in the Colony’s council, a man with a powerful Touch, yet he toils as an equal beside me, treats me as though I matter.

“How long has the Colony been here?” I ask.

His head rocks to the side as he ponders his reply. “Two hundred years, three hundred years. I don’t think it started all at once. We’re the descendants of Biters, as your sister prefers to call us.”

My head drops forward in a sigh. “She’s relentless.”

Priest gives me a playful shove on my shoulder with his stunted arm. I peer at him sideways, glimpsing his white smile, his gorgeously dark skin, black hair short, and face freshly shaved but for the thin line of hair on his lip and under his chin. It’s his obsidian eyes, gleaming with humor, that entangle me.

“It’s not ‘how long,’ but ‘why’ that matters,” he continues, mirroring my stare with one of his own. “Some generations ago a few of us Biters wanted a life beyond wandering and raiding, a chance for our children, a place where they might thrive. Community
and
compassion, an innovative venture compared to the world we survived.”

“Rimma wants us to travel to the Fortress,” I tell him, resting my head briefly on his shoulder.

“Why, Angel?” He shakes his head, baffled by her wish. “Civilization lacking foresight, absent of empathy. It’s the sin that broke this world in the first place.” He digs a stone from the dirt and tosses it in the stream. “I travel there every spring to ask if we might unite, add our people to theirs. It would be so much easier with many able hands. But they won’t accept all our people. They won’t accept Chantri or Kya…or me. They don’t believe we have anything of value to offer.”

“That seems cruel as well as senseless,” I mutter.

“Self-deceptive because they believe only what they see. Cowardly because they refuse to consider the unfamiliar, dangerous because little is ever so neatly defined and most continues to change.”

“I’d rather stay here,” I confess.

“So stay.” He reaches over and touches my cheek, his dark fingers brushing aside a strand of pale hair.

“If only it were so easy. You don’t know my sister.”

“She’s suffered, Angel, and I won’t hold her feelings against her. Give her time.”

“You
really
don’t know Rimma,” I inform him with a weary smile, and it’s true. I’ve kept most of our past to myself, though part of me longs to share every detail and have him tell me it’s not our fault, that we couldn’t have escaped the massive shifts beneath our feet. I’m afraid of all our mistakes, that he’ll accuse us of too much complicity or too much resistance. I judge my sister’s choices harshly, my helplessness as cowardly. And yet at the same time, despite all our failings, I must accept that who we are and what we’ve done has ultimately led me here to this summer evening by the stream with this man.

“I’m glad you’re here.” Priest pushes himself to his feet and offers me his hand, pulling me up to stand in front of him. “The people who join us aren’t all angels,” he admits with a grin. “Some arrive with a sordid history that would qualify Rimma as a paragon of virtue.”

“She has a way of forcing decisions on us,” I hedge.

“I’d like you to stay, Angel. I like the company.”

We’re standing terribly close, the air between us clotted with desire. My woozy legs wobble and my breath sticks in my chest. No different from a giddy child, I pick up my bushel of greens, holding it innocently between us and avoiding the liquid eyes that drown my reason and restraint. With the River Walkers, I possessed so few choices, and when I reflect on my life in Heaven, not many more. I’m unversed in wielding power, more comfortable with rules scratched in a fat book, even to acquire the things I crave. He bestows upon me the voice of a woman with choices, expects me to decide questions for myself, a wondrous and nerve-racking experience.

I believe he wants to kiss me, waits for some sign from me, and my choice feels terrifying. I know what kissing leads to; I witnessed it with my mother and father that last night, the passionate desperation in the bodies. I saw it with Rimma and Rune and Greeb, a swill of lust, domination, cold manipulation, and violence. The Colony is so similar to the River Walkers in their willingness to…fornicate or fuck or whatever they call it here. It all seems so…out of control, so…unfamiliar. I understand the desire to procreate and bear children who’ll have a chance at survival, but I want to understand the rules. And Rimma told me it hurts, and I don’t want to hurt. “Shall we go?” I squeak, mortified.

With a smile, he takes one side of my bushel and we amble up the steps into the city beneath the cliffs, wending our way to the kitchens, our food baking, boiling, and roasting without any source of flame, one of many things I wonder if I’ll ever become accustomed to or fully understand.

17

~Rimma~

Small memories stamp my dreams, primarily of pain with a sharp edge of humiliation and cold sweats of fear. I recall little of my ordeal at the Biters’ hands beyond that, and I suppose it’s for the best. It’s what occurred afterward that I remember in precise detail; waking on the travois, jounced over rocky ground, every thump and bump torturous, for days on end. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t move, couldn’t rise to piss or shit. Angel tended me, dribbled broth between my lips, cleaned me, listened to my muffled cries, my blubbering sobs, spittle hissing from my broken mouth, snot running over my lips that I couldn’t wipe away. She nursed me back to health just as my mother would have done, and I both loved and hated her for it.