“Is it true what they say,” I asked him “that the air there is pure and that the EYE’s power cannot penetrate the shield of rock?”
“We must hope so,” he replied. “We must believe and keep faith.”
I liked the simple frankness of his reply. And it was sheer delight for me to speak again with someone so elderly, who was quick of mind and who still managed to walk strongly albeit he sometimes leaned heavily upon his stick. The mere fact of this man’s existence made him a rarity. By the time I turned twenty we seldom saw an old person on the streets of the City. There had for years been rumours that the EYE had a secret program of mass euthanasia to dispose of the aged, regardless of their state of health. But if I saw Harry as a living wonder, Candace took a completely opposite view.
“He reeks,” she whispered in my ear, yet loud enough I feared for Harry and the boy to hear. “He’s probably crawling with vermin. And the boy’s white as a slug. He’s obviously got some kind of wasting disease. And that earring! You’re not thinking of inviting them to travel with us, are you?”
She stood back, planted her fists on her hips and put on one of her censorious little pouts. I didn’t even bother to respond. We had an obvious moral obligation here for one thing. Old Harry and the boy stood a far better chance of survival if Candace and I travelled with them. We were all headed in the same general direction and four pairs of eyes and ears would be a distinct advantage as we got into the denser part of the forest. Besides, Harry knew where we were going. He had actually lived near the northern Sea Lake. I had only heard of this place. For me, it was like a dream of paradise and all I had was my inner compass, the guidance of the stars, my nose and my faith to guide me.
So I decided on the spot to override Candace’s reservations and ask Harry if he and the boy wanted to join forces with us — or with me, as the case might be. If Candace wanted to strike off on her own, she was very welcome to do so.
When she heard me put the invitation to Harry, she stamped her foot and glared at me. Her furious round face, with her straight-cut bangs, made me think of pictures I had seen of grimacing gargoyles. I at once regretted this unkind thought.
“Candace wants to found a community north of the Shield.” I blurted this out, in some vain attempt to bring her out of her petulance.
“One of those holier-than-thou places?” asked Harry. While I was sure he was teasing, I knew how offensive Candace would find this remark. Indeed she looked genuinely affronted.
“Absolutely not,” she snapped. “And I consider your question both insulting and in extremely poor taste.”
“It was a joke,” he said. “What people used to call lighthearted banter.” He winked at me.
“Harrumph,” said Candace. She uses this expression whenever she is indignant, and it seems to involve the expulsion of a great deal of air from her lungs in a noisy rush. She has quite often been indignant with me, usually because I have not been listening closely enough to what she is telling me.
“We would be very pleased to travel with you. Thank you,” said Harry, pointedly addressing us both. Candace took herself off in an apparent fit of pique, and began to pace back and forth on the path at some distance from us. Her hands were thrust deep in her pockets.
Harry looked at me with a keen sympathy, and we waited until we were sure Candace was out of earshot.
“She’s a bit of an endurance test,” he said with a mock glum face that made me laugh. The sound of my own laughter surprised and pleased me. It had been a long time since I had last laughed in any way except wryly. And even my wry laughter was many years ago. The boy stared at me closely for some seconds. Then he smiled at me, a smile I willingly returned. I saw then how beautiful his face was when he let go of his rigid anxiety. I did not want to speculate on the kind of horrific things he had gone through before Harry came upon him. The boy had such a fragile innocence about him. It made mes equally enraged and despairing to think of anyone deliberately making him or any other child suffer.
I wanted to get moving again and shake off these poisonous thoughts with a good stride. I sensed Harry’s impatience with Candace and her sulky show of defiance, as he looked at her pacing back and forth, and then at me.
“It serves no purpose to be standing around like this,” he said. I got his drift. Her rudeness had gone on long enough.
“Candace?” I called out. “Are you coming?”
I heard her make one of her harrumphing noises, as she shrugged her shoulders. I had actually decided to go on without her, when she approached us, frowning. She said nothing, only glared at each of us in turn, but longest at Harry. Then she officiously took the lead, and we set off in a queue, with me at the rear, watching and listening, and with my right hand always close to the handle of my knife. I wondered again if my decision to leave my machete behind in the City had been the right one.
We walked that day until just after sunset; then settled for the night in a small clearing about ten paces from the main path. I made sure I positioned the campfire so that whoever was on night watch could see in every direction, with no trees blocking their line of vision. Candace took the first watch and Harry and Chandelier together did the second. When I assumed my turn at midnight, the forest was absolutely still. All I could hear was someone discreetly breaking wind (Candace, I thought), the occasional sharp crack of a joint as Harry flexed his elbow or his knee and sometimes — so soft it might be mistaken for the hum of insects busy underground — the sound of the boy moaning in his sleep. I wished with all my heart that I could dispel the dream-images that drew this pitiful sound from him. Yet I was relieved as well to hear he had a voice.
These were the sounds my human companions made in the darkness that enclosed us and I found a strength and contentment in the fact we were together (yes, even Candace), travelling in the same direction. Four of us. Four square. I wondered if we might meet others who would want to join us, not imagining then just how soon that would come to pass.
Two days later, when I was out on a morning foraging expedition, I saw a flash and blur of colour ahead of me through the trees. It was as if the arc of a rainbow was spinning on its axis. I was mesmerized, and a little frightened, as one always is at the apparition of some strange new form of beauty. I held my breath and approached as silently as I could, walking on the balls of my feet. Then I spied a young woman whirling with her arms out-flung in the centre of a ring of fleshy, brown-flanged mushrooms. The rainbow effect was produced by the dazzling hues she wore: translucent tangerine leggings, purple slip-on shoes, a tiny frilled skirt in an abstract pattern of cornflower blue and primrose yellow barely long enough to cover her bottom, and a leotard top of the brightest emerald green I have ever seen. Her hair was fair and fine and the morning light caught in her silken curls as she twirled and hummed to herself. “E-pon-a” is what she seemed to sing. “E-pon-a.” The same word, or perhaps just nonsense syllables, over and over.
It was that repetition, and the whirling round and round, that made me fear at first she might be mad. I was concerned too for her safety if she was travelling alone. She had the prettiness and slender grace that make one think automatically of fairy lands, and there are many men, and some women, who cannot see such delicacy without the urge to trample it.
“Hello,” I called out.
She froze on the spot as if she was playing the old childhood game of statues. She stood balanced on her left foot, with her right just off the ground. She kept her outstretched arms absolutely still, right down to her fingertips. Then she turned her small head to look at me and in an instant was at my side with her hand extended in greeting.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Bird Girl.” I barely had time to tell her mine when she asked abruptly: “Have you ever read a poem called ‘A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’?”
She did not wait for my reply but rattled on. “Part of it goes: ‘And to feel the light is a rabbit-light / In which everything is meant for you / And nothing need be explained.’
“Do you think,” she went on, speaking extremely rapidly, “that this is rabbit-light?” And she thrust her hand into the gold-white shaft that fell aslant through the treetops. I smiled at her. From the look she sent me in return, I saw that she was not only quite sane, but also astute.
“I get carried away sometimes,” she said, “with thinking about the things I love best.”
I told her this also happened to me, especially when I was working with my clay.
“I thought you looked like an artist,” she said, which made me warm to her all the more.
She told me then she was travelling alone, searching for her mother who had disappeared from the warehouse in the City where she had lived.
“Have you heard of a women’s vigilante group called The New Amazons?” she asked. “They ride motorcycles and do raids on pimps and pornographers. My mother is The New Amazons’ leader,” she said proudly. “Her name is Epona.”
So I understood then it was her mother’s name she was humming when I first saw her twirling about.
“And do you believe your mother is headed north?” I asked.
“I think it’s likely,” she replied. “My mother and her gang have made some very powerful enemies — people who are close to the EYE. She had found out some secrets about links between the innovative industries and the brothels and human trafficking.
“And then too . . . ” she hesitated. “She maybe felt she was getting too old to go on waging war against evil, ugly men.
“They say,” and her face was ecstatic as she spoke, “that one is free in the North. I mean, freer to be the person we really are. We won’t always have to be fighting thought-control because there won’t be any EYE. And the air won’t be poisoned.
“They’d started to put chemicals in the air that made you feel stupid and confused, don’t you think? And all those corpses everywhere, just left . . . Ugh!”
She made a little leap on the spot and shook herself.
‘I think that in the North,” she announced solemnly, “there will be no end to the rabbit-light.”
I realized then she was one of those people of such abundant quick energy it must always be spilling over, in dart-like action or glittering chatter. Yet unlike Candace, Bird Girl also knew how to be silent. On instinct I liked her immensely.
Her mood seemed to switch abruptly and she looked troubled. “You haven’t seen a man with one real eye and one made of marble, have you? I mean here, in the forest? Or a man with a misshapen nose? You can see it’s been slit right down the middle and then healed badly. Have you seen either of them? You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”
She had become most agitated and was hopping from foot to foot, while wringing her hands.
“No,” I told her. “I’ve seen no one like that. No one at all. Are they your enemies?” I did not know how else to put it.
“The man with the marble eye is my enemy. The man with the nose is my mother’s. But I suppose you could say he is also mine, since I am my mother’s daughter and he would consider me a quite suitable object of vengeance, I think.
“Let’s talk about something else altogether,” she urged me.
“I cannot stand the shadows those two throw upon my mind if I think of them too long.
She twirled round then, and fluttered her arms. “Have you ever held a real book, one kept safe from the burnings?” she asked when she came to a stop again.
“Yes.” But before I could say anything more, she grasped my hand and said rapturously “Isn’t it wonderful? I mean, there’s nothing better on earth than to hold and read a real paper book. Don’t you think?”
She jumped backward again and whirled about, then asked: “Have you heard about the Cyberspace Library?”
I nodded, although I have always thought this legend of a vast invisible net holding all knowledge was likely mere fantasy — something people dreamed up after the book burnings.
“They say it contained much untruth, as well as wisdom,” she said. “And that you needed a good internal map to negotiate its windings or you might find yourself unawares in a horrid trap and never get free again. But the most wonderful thing about the vast net was that it contained whole books. You could sit and read every word upon a little screen.”
Her round blue eyes widened even more. “What do you think happened to all those cyber-books after the viruses destroyed the net? Do you think they’re still out there somewhere?” She gestured vaguely at the sky. “Out there as spectral books or ghost-books?
“But I’d rather hold a real, three-dimensional book, wouldn’t you, and know the joy of touching and turning the pages and looking off into the middle distance as you picture what you just read? Real books are all so amazingly idiosyncratic. They even have their own smells.”
Here she stopped, as if another kind of thought had struck her dumb. She took three quick steps to stand close by me and clasped my right hand tightly between her palms. How cold her hands were.
“You would tell me if you’d seen either of those men, wouldn’t you? I mean, you wouldn’t hold back information because you didn’t want to frighten me?”
“I would always tell you the truth,” I declared. “I’ve seen no one like the two you describe.”
“Would you like to travel with us?” I asked her. I very much wanted her to have whatever protection we could offer.
“We are four so far.” And I told her briefly about Candace, Chandelier, and Harry.
She frowned at my description of Candace even though I tried hard to keep any hint of distaste out of my voice.
“She sounds like a know-it-all,” she remarked.
I laughed.
In fact, Candace began clucking and fussing over Bird Girl as soon as she saw her. Chandelier watched her warily, as he did everyone with the exception of Harry. But Bird Girl and Harry hit it off immediately and were soon making silly faces at each other behind Candace’s back as she went on at length about why her great gifts as a social facilitator made her eminently suited for founding a community where fellowship would flow naturally . . . I had heard it all many times before.