Читать книгу The Fire Sermon - Francesca Haig - Страница 10

They let me stay for four days, until the burn had begun to heal. It was Zach who rubbed balm on my forehead. He winced as he did it, whether from pain or disgust I didn’t know.

‘Hold still.’ His tongue emerged from the corner of his mouth as he peered close to clean the wound. He’d always done that when he concentrated. I was extra aware of these small things, now, knowing that I wouldn’t see them anymore.

He dabbed again. He was very gentle, but I couldn’t help but flinch as he touched the raw skin.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Not sorry for exposing me – sorry only for the blistered flesh.

‘It’ll get better in a few weeks. But I’ll be gone by then. You’re not sorry about that.’

He put down the cloth and looked out the window. ‘It couldn’t stay the same. It couldn’t be the two of us, any longer. It’s not right.’

‘You realise you’re going to be by yourself, now.’

He shook his head. ‘You kept me by myself. I can go to school now. I’ll have the others.’

‘The ones who throw rocks at us when we pass by the school? It was me who cleaned up the wound when Nick landed that rock right above your eye. Who’s going to mop up your blood once they’ve sent me away?’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ He smiled at me. For the first time I could remember, he was perfectly serene. ‘They only threw rocks because of you. Because you made us both into a freak show. Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again.’

It was refreshing, in a way, to be able to speak openly after all the subterfuge. For those few days before I left, we were more comfortable together than we had been for years.

‘You didn’t see it coming?’ he asked, on my last night, when he’d blown out the candle on the table between our beds.

‘I saw the brand. I felt it burning.’

‘But you didn’t know how I’d do it? That I’d declare myself the Omega?’

‘I guess I only got a glimpse of what would happen in the end. That it would be me.’

‘But it might have been me. If you hadn’t said.’

‘Maybe.’ I shifted again. The only bearable way to lie was on my back, so that the burn didn’t touch the pillow. ‘In my dreams, it was always me branded.’ Did that mean that staying silent had never been an option? Had he known so surely that I would speak up? And what if I hadn’t?

I left at dawn the next day. Zach’s happiness was barely disguised, and didn’t surprise me, though I was saddened to see how my mother rushed the farewell. She avoided looking at my face, as she had ever since the branding. I’d seen it only once myself, sneaking into Mum’s room to meet my new face in the small mirror there. The burn was still raised and blistered, but despite the inflammation surrounding it, the mark was clear. I remembered the Councilman’s words, and repeated them to myself: ‘This is what I am.’ Holding my finger just above the scorched flesh I traced the shape: the incomplete circle, like an inverted horseshoe, with a short horizontal line spreading out at each end. ‘This is what I am,’ I said again.

What surprised me, when I left, was my own relief. Although the pain of my brand was still sharp, and although Mum pushed a parcel of food into my arms when I tried to embrace her, there was something liberating about leaving behind those years of hiding. When Zach said, ‘Take care of yourself,’ I nearly laughed out loud.

‘You mean: take care of you.’

He looked straight at me, not averting his eyes from my brand the way our mother did. ‘Yes.’

I thought that maybe, for the first time in years, we were being honest with each other.

Of course, I cried. I was thirteen years old and I had never been parted from my family before. The furthest I’d ever been from Zach was the day he journeyed to collect Alice. I wondered if it would have been easier if I’d been branded as a child. I would have been raised in an Omega settlement, never known what it was to be with my family, with my twin. I might even have had friends, though never having experienced any closeness apart from with Zach, I didn’t really know what that might mean. At least, I thought, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore.

I was wrong. I was hardly even out of the village when I passed a group of children my own age. Although Zach and I had not been able to attend the school, we knew all the local children, had even played with them in the early years, before our strange togetherness became a public problem. Zach had always carried himself with confidence, and insisted he would fight anyone who said he wasn’t an Alpha. But as the years passed, parents began to warn their children away from the unsplit twins, so we’d relied more and more on each other for company, even as Zach’s resentment at our isolation grew. During the last few years the other children had not just avoided us, but had openly taunted us, hurling rocks and insults if our parents were out of sight.

The four children, three boys and a girl, had been riding on a pair of old donkeys, taking turns to race each other on their comically awkward mounts. I heard them from a distance, and saw them shortly afterwards. I kept my head down and kept to the side of the narrow road, but word of our split had spread quickly, and when they grew close enough to see my brand they were filled with the excitement of seeing the news confirmed.

They surrounded me. Nick, the tallest of the boys, spoke first, while the others looked with undisguised disgust at my brand.

‘Looks like Zach can finally come to school.’

Nick hadn’t spoken to either of us for years, other than to shout slurs, but it seemed my branding had immediately returned Zach to favour.

Another of the boys spoke: ‘Your kind don’t belong here.’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said, and tried to break away, but Nick blocked my way and shoved me back towards the others, who shoved me again. I dropped my parcel and instinctively shielded the wound on my head as the boys’ blows sent me stumbling from side to side within the tiny ring they had formed. A taunt accompanied each shove: ‘freak’; ‘dead-end’; ‘poison’.

My hands still over my face, I turned to Ruth, a dark-haired girl who lived only a few houses from us. I whispered, ‘Stop them. Please.’

Ruth reached forward, and for a second I thought she was going to take my arm. Instead she bent down, grabbed my flask, and emptied my water slowly on to the ground, where one of the donkeys made a futile attempt to slurp at it as it sank into the sandy soil. ‘That’s our water,’ Ruth said. ‘From the Alpha well. You’ve been contaminating it long enough, freak.’

They left me without looking back. I waited until they were out of sight before gathering my things and making my way down to the river. Emptying the flask had been a harmless act: the river water, though brackish and warm, was perfectly safe to drink. But even as I crouched at the river’s edge to fill the flask again, I knew the significance of Ruth’s gesture. To the Alphas, perhaps even my own mother, my life up to now had been a lie, my place in the village kept through deceit.

For the rest of the day I avoided the road, instead scrambling along the banks of the river. I fastened my shawl over my head, flinching when it touched my burn. The one time I passed a farmer, an Alpha woman bringing her goats down to the river’s edge to drink, I scuttled past in silence, head down. I didn’t stop when I reached the gorge leading west to the silos, but pushed onwards, further south than I’d ever been.

It had taken Zach more than half a day in the cart to reach the Omega settlement when he collected Alice. For me, on foot, avoiding the roads, my footsteps never quite keeping time with the throbbing of my head, it took nearly three days. Several times a day I stopped to bathe my forehead in the river, and to tear off some bread from the parcel Mum had given me. I slept on the riverbank, glad of the midsummer warmth. On the second morning I re-joined the road, where it curved away from the river to climb up the valley. Although I was still afraid of encountering people, it was for a different reason. I was in Omega country now.

The landscape itself was different. The Alphas had always claimed the best land for their own. The valley where I’d been raised was good farming country, the soil plush with river-silt. Up here there was no valley to shield the land from the harsh light, which glared from the rocky soil. The grass, where it grew at all, was brittle and pale, and the roadside was covered with brambles. Their barbed leaves glistened with spiderwebs, a thick mist that did not lift. There was some other strangeness, too, that I couldn’t work out until I looked about to refill my flask, and realised that, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hear the river. Its noise had been the backdrop to my entire life, and I knew it intimately: the surge of the high water in flood season, the heavy buzz of insects that drifted over the still pools in summer. The river had always provided the spine of my mental map of the area: upstream from the village was south, past the gorge and the silos that Zach and I used to dare each other to approach. Further upstream lay Wyndham, the biggest city and the Council’s base. I’d never been that far, but had heard stories of its size and wealth. Even the refuge outside Wyndham, Mum had told me, was bigger than any town I’d seen. Downstream led north, through the fields, larger villages. A day’s walk downriver was Haven, the market-town where Dad used to take us when we were smaller. Beyond Haven, the shallow rapids took the river beyond my knowledge.

Now, in Omega country, I was still confident that I could find my way – I could usually sense the landscape, just as I could sense emotions and events. But without the river, I felt cut loose, turning about on this unfamiliar plain. There was only one road and I followed it as my mother had told me. I left it only once, following some tell-tale birds to a small spring that bubbled from a crack in the rock, from which I drank quickly before scrambling back to the barren road.

By the time I saw the settlement, night was lowering on the plain, and the first lamps had been lit in the windows. The cluster of houses was smaller than my village, but substantial enough that there could be no doubt. A huddle of low buildings, surrounded by a spread of fields, where the recently harvested crops were bald in patches and interrupted by large boulders. I pulled back the shawl that covered my head, waving away the flies that made busy with the still-seeping burn. This is what I am, I reminded myself, one hand on the key that hung at my neck. But as I approached, a small figure on the wide and broken road, I wished that Zach were by my side. A stupid thought, I reprimanded myself. Nonetheless, he had been like the sound of the river to me: always there.