Beyond Zane, through the gray rain, I catch a glimpse of running Biters, a flaxen-haired woman clutching a small child to her chest, fleeing at the edge of the bone wall with a bullish man close on her heels, a sword drawn as he shouts at her. My mother. We’re fighting the Brothers of the Scar.
My arm pressed to my chest, I dart through the battle, feet slapping in the wet clay, bellowing her name. She must hear me because her head jerks around scanning the fight, terror stark in her eyes, her gaping mouth. She doesn’t see me and runs, the child wailing in her arms, the man pounding after her, long black hair rain-soaked against his back, watery blood running down his face. She slips, landing on her knees, holding the child from the ground. The man stops behind her, grabs her arm and lifts her as I catch up, raise the pipe and slam it down on the back of his head with every ounce of might within me. His skull cracks sharp as lightning; the pipe jars from my fingers and bounces off a stone to spear the slick clay. My mother screams, stumbling and scrambling on her knees with the baby tucked in an arm, rain hissing, metal clashing, death screeching from the bone wall above the roar. She crawls in the mud, keening and howling her pain, not to me, but to the man.
Horror rises within me, the broken world shrieking with glee as I stare at her. She wears no beaded ring in her ear; she’s no slave. My eyes shift to the blue-eyed toddler, the little face contorted with terror, a three-fingered hand clutching my mother’s shirt.
My mother picks up a rock and hurls it at me, striking my chest. “Get away from me,” she screams, kneeling in the rain and red mud, throwing another rock that bloodies my cheek. I step back, my fingers shaking as she screams at me, “You murdered your sister’s father!”
2
8
~Angel~
Alone, before the rest of our force returns, Rimma rides in on a tall roan through sheets of gray rain. “Get your gear,” she says quietly without a word of explanation. I don’t dare argue or question her command. I don’t ask about the arm bound tight to her ribs or offer to tend the swollen wound on her cheek. Something in her overcast eyes appears brittle, her skin a thin shell that will crack at the slightest touch.
Our rolled blankets and packs cinched to the saddle, she mounts with a wince, a jerk of her head indicating I should follow. Obedient, I clamber up behind her, my arms encircling her waist.
For two days, we ride alone, north along the old river-road, barely speaking beyond the mere smattering of words required to make camp, to cook, pack up and ride again.
“Are we going to Heaven?” I ask. We stand at the center of the bridge, hanging onto the flaking rail. Its two huge towers soar toward leaden clouds, coils of red rust draping gracefully between them as the pitted road crumbles away beneath out feet. Pebbles plink through the deceptive surface below. The river swirls and glides over deep water, hiding the turmoil beneath its calm exterior. Someday the bridge will fall, like all else in the broken world.
My sister doesn’t answer. She leans over the water, her eyes closed, pearl-white hair falling forward, hiding her face. My hand hovers at her back, not touching, but ready to grab ahold should she let go and float through the air to her death. With a sigh, she opens her eyes, pale as the steely sky, and we cross the bridge.
Cutting through copses of cottonwood and black oak, we find the stream that dwindles to a trickling creek. A lifetime ago, Rimma and I explored its banks in naïve innocence, convinced we charted a great river. I wonder what we might have done differently with greater knowledge and broader experience. Would it have made any difference? I think not much, truly; our destinies, the fates of all the people left in the broken world, set in motion long before our births. How sorely we needed wisdom in the ancient past when our ancestors, the deceivers, hammered the first cracks in the flesh of the world.
From a distance, Heaven’s bone wall resembles a low hill, a bank of earth rising from the flat land. It’s not until we ride closer that its shape becomes uniform, unnatural. I glimpse the stark remnants of our pines barbed against the sky and a line of rooftop, the women’s residence. I think Rimma will ride through the open gate, but she reins in the mare outside the wall, dismounts and paces back and forth, searching, kicking at the hard ground and soft dust with the toe of her boot. She seeks our father’s grave.
In silence, I search with her, my eyes elsewhere when her boot scrapes the rim of a blue jar. She drops to her knees, scratching around the lip with one hand, fingernails clawing at the dirt. I kneel beside her to help, both of us wriggling it loose of the soil. She sniffles, tears shed down her checks and dripping to the dust. Her chest heaves with uncontainable sobs, and I feel my own eyes welling, my own pain escaping to water the clay. When the jar breaks free, she grips it to her chest with one arm and staggers to the bank of the creek, I on her heels. She slides down, careless of the pain in her arm and dirt in her clothes, the scraping of her skin as the bank crumbles beneath her. While she holds the jar in the water, I clean off the dirt, the blue ceramic brilliant once again. We fill it with water, struggle up the bank, and bury it where we found it.
The broken world gives up its stalky yellow weed and sky-blue stars, its magenta petals and violet lupine, flame red crowns of bee balm. We stuff the stems into the jar, and I hold Rimma’s hand as she weeps.
Ghosts reside within the bone wall’s ring. Wraiths from centuries past, phantoms of descendants of Paradise and Heaven who died here, lives lost to violence and disease. Our father wanders the fallow fields with Max and Barth, most of the men of Heaven. Shades of Rimma and me milk goats, pick apples, and climb trees. Those little doves have long flown.
The wind speaks with a voice here, rattling hinges, thumping loose boards, whistling through cracks and around corners. With it blows a sea of sand and dust, swallowing the land until it disappears into a broken landscape. God’s House of Law feels cold inside, sand collected in corners, broken windows crusted with dust, puddled water warping the floor. The women’s residence molders with a rank mustiness, a gray film coating its contents like a second skin. The burned hull of the men’s residence still bares its black bones, but within its ashes, I spy tufts of rice-grass, trailing mallow and bluebells.
We stay for two weeks, living off an early harvest of plants left to bolt and reseed in our neglected gardens. Each day we tend the flowers at my father’s grave, spending hours by the creek in quiet idleness. Rimma sleeps and wanders, her body healing though I think her soul has shattered. Whatever happened outside Sanctuary’s walls remains a mystery.
This morning, I saddle the horse and pack our belongings. Rimma doesn’t complain or question; she mounts behind me and leaves me to guide the snorting beast. We clop from the north gate of Heaven, never to return.
**
At least the rain blows off and the air dries summer-blue and sharp, because the horse takes its sweet time, halting our forward trudge at its leisure to chomp grass and bird-watch. It wanders off the ancient road and attempts to scrape us off on tree branches. Rimma speaks nothing of my utter lack of horsemanship, but I feel her sigh or catch her breath at my back. I wonder if she prods the contrary monster along with her heels while I pull uselessly on the reins. I wonder if she smiles.
Once over the bridge, we don’t follow the road into the hills. By some miracle, I convince the horse to clomp along a trail tracking the bank of the main river. This too might once have been a well-traveled road, but little remains: an occasional chunk of black stone or patch of gravel, a parting of larger trees, a broken wall or slowly-filling foundation. The trail ascends, disappears where carved away by the river, reappears and joins with another ancient road bordered by scrappy juniper and pine. The trees cling to the steep walls of a ravine, our river reduced to a tumbling stream. For more than a week we’ve journeyed toward the mountains, a rough blue horizon silhouetted against the summer sky.
“I won’t be welcome,” Rimma whispers in my ear, my intentions now clear.
“Priest and Simone will understand. The rest will follow,” I assure her, relieved she exhibits an awakening interest in self-preservation.
“Angel, they’ll see me first,” she warns, and she’s right. Rimma might as well sit this horse alone for all the power I have to sway our entrance into the Colony.
“They won’t slay you,” I assure her. “Trust me, Rimma.” She says no more as I feel her forehead resting on my shoulder.
As we near our destination, I witness small changes to the landscape and my heart surges, impatient with the ornery horse’s slow-as-honey pace. More land lies free of brush and stone, sprinkled with green bouquets of cultivation. Goats and sheep graze in expanding grassland, the sage burned away. Bordering the fast-moving water, there’s a new farmhouse and a mill under construction, its walls partially mudded. Men labor with metal trowels, coppery clay drying on their arms to their elbows. Women mix buckets of the muddy paste while children scamper in and out of everyone’s way. Two pregnant women tend to a gaggle of toddlers, herding them away from the stream.
The toil pauses as we ride up, and two figures rise from the rocks ahead. They start toward us, Chantri with her familiar spikey hair and limp, and Tannis, long brown braids dangling down his chest, wide face creased by a smile.
“Huh,” Chantri says skeptically, a hand on the horse’s rein as she studies me. “Angel, right?”
“Um…me?” My eyes dart between her and Tannis, blinking away my bewilderment. They speak to
me
. “Uh huh.”
“Rimma with you?” Chantri asks.
“Yes,” I reply, stumped by the odd sensation, my hands shaking. I feel instantly on display as if the world has opened its eyes on me, the power of presence strangely uncomfortable.
“It’s alright,” Rimma says in my ear. “Relax.”
“I’m…we’re…here to see Priest.
“I’ll bet you are,” Chantri replies, a quirk to her lip. She steps back. “Go on, we’ll catch up later.”
The horse moseys into the mouth of a canyon between smooth painted walls. We clop downward through the unmanned gate in the wall, its wide wooden door propped open with a rock. Perhaps the Colony elected not to build a bone wall after all.
“They saw me, Rimma. Not you,” I finally confess, feeling like a thief.
“Enjoy the responsibility,” she replies.
The fields ripen with green, new irrigation ditches feeding late summer’s bounty, the yield denser and vibrant. More people labor in the fields, more children. I hear a squeal of delight and spot Kya hopping and flapping in a patch of purple leaves. She lifts her skirts and scampers toward us, squeaking and cooing. I dismount and hug her, wave to other faces that see me, that I know and miss. Then I see Priest emerging from the crowd.
He’s distant yet, but his ebony skin is unmistakable as he steps carefully down the narrow path between two rows. His wide smile looks beautiful, the air about him aglow, and I don’t know if it’s the way his body moves through waves of energy, or if it’s just me and my own love and desire stretching across the gap between us. As he nears, I sense curiosity in the graceful tilt of his dark eyes. He halts short of me, studying us. “Welcome home,” he says¸ and I believe he means his words for my sister’s ears as well as mine.
**
In Heaven, the banished, those cast out through our gates into the broken world, received no reprieve. Life in the world is less orderly, the patterns of chaos linked to chance, harsher in many ways but with a lesser degree of predictability. Who lives, who dies, who stays and goes remains fluid, nuanced, subject to change. I gather hope around me like a well-worn cloak as we file into the Council chamber.
The four chairs are occupied, the postures and expressions of those who will judge my sister as varied as the seasons. Priest’s long body relaxes against a wooden arm, one foot resting on his knee as his eyes shift between us. He and I have spent only short moments together, the need for this hearing foremost in his mind. The desire between us is palpable, taut as a rope despite his casual bearing.
Shoulders hunched, his dark eyes narrowed, Cash studies me. I feel on display, unused to visibility when my sister is near. The bald councilor’s sharp chin points at me in judgment, and however mistaken he might be with his accusatory glower, he isn’t truly wrong; his decision will decide for us both.
Harder to read, blind Jeph sits erect, pale eyes distant in his dark face. Few crowd the benches this evening, and I wonder what he sees in the emotions swirling from our skins. What does he read from Chantri and Tannis where they stand against the back wall? Does he perceive gratefulness in the air around Dela and Rik and the Touched infant in Dela’s arms, even though that gratefulness is for me? Is Kya’s love, Priest’s passion visible to his eye? He isn’t here to judge me, yet does he perceive my connection to my twin?
Nor can I read Simone as she rises to her feet and faces me to begin the proceedings. “We are here foremost to decide whether to forgive or enforce a banishment, weigh our responsibility, and act accordingly. In a world so full of suffering, it is the duty of each of us to make a covenant of peace within us, with the stones of the mountains and the wild animals, with all those scattered on the hills like sheep without a shepherd.”