And then we hear gunfire from a different direkshun–
Just one gun, lonely on its own somehow–
Bang and then bang again–
And the Mayor’s already grabbing his rifle and I’m right behind him, cuz it’s coming from behind the power stayshun, off a side road near the empty riverbed and some soldiers are already running towards it, too, with Mr O’Hare, and it gets darker as we all race away from the army camp, darker with no more sounds of anything happening–
And then we get there.
There were just two guards on the power stayshun, no more than engineers really, cuz who’s gonna attack the power stayshun when the whole army’s twixt it and the Spackle–
But there are two Spackle bodies on the ground outside the door. They’re lying next to one of the guards, his body in three big, separate pieces, blown apart by the acid rifle things. Inside, the power stayshun is a wreck, equipment melting from the acid, which is just as good at destroying things as it is people.
We find the second guard a hundred metres away, halfway cross the dry riverbed, obviously firing at Spackle as they ran.
The top half of his head is missing.
The Mayor ain’t happy at all. “This isn’t how we’re meant to fight,” he says, his voice low and sizzling. “Slinking around like cave rats. Night-time raids rather than open battle.”
“I’ll get reports from the squadrons we sent out, sir,” says Mr O’Hare, “see where the breach was.”
“You do that, Captain,” the Mayor says, “but I doubt they’ll tell you anything other than that they saw no movement at all.”
“They wanted our attenshun somewhere else,” I say. “Looking out rather than in. That’s why they killed the spies.”
He looks at me slowly, carefully. “Exactly right, Todd,” he says. Then he turns back to look at the town, darker now, with townsfolk out in their bedclothes, lined up to see what’s happened.
“So be it,” I hear the Mayor whisper to himself. “If that’s the war they want, then that’s the war we’ll give them.”
The Embrace of the Land
(THE RETURN)
The Land has lost a part of itself, the Sky shows, opening his eyes. But the job is done.
I feel the hollowness that echoes through the Land at the loss of those who led the smaller attack on the heart of the Clearing, those who went knowing they probably would not return, but that by their actions, the voice of the Land might sing on.
I would give my own voice, I show to the Sky as the campfire warms us in the cold night, if it would mean the end of the Clearing.
But what a loss the silencing of the Return would be, he shows, reaching out his voice to mine. Not when you travelled so far to join us.
Travelled so far, I think.
For I did travel far.
After the Knife pulled me from the bodies of the Burden, after I showed him my vow to kill him, after we heard the approach of horses on the road and he begged me to run–
I ran.
The town was in burning turmoil at the time, the confusion and smoke letting me pass through the southern end of it unseen. Then I hid myself until nightfall, when I made my way up the crooked road out of town. Sticking to the underbrush, I crept up, zig by zag, until there was no cover left and I had to stand and run, fully exposed for the last stretch, expecting every moment for a bullet to the back of my head from the valley below–
An end which I craved but also feared–
But I made it to the top and over.
And I ran.
I ran towards a rumour, a legend that lived in the voice of the Burden. We were of the Land, but some of us had never seen it, some of the young like me, born into the war that left the Burden behind when the Land made a promise never to return. And so the Land, like their battlemores, was shadows and fables, stories and whispers, dreams of the day the Land would return to free us.
Some of us gave up that hope. Some of us never had it, never forgiving the Land for leaving us there in the first place.
Some like my one in particular who, though only older than me by a matter of moons and likewise never having seen the Land, would gently show to me that I should let go any hope of rescue, of any life other than one we might carve out ourselves among the voices of the Clearing, telling me this on the nights I was afraid, telling me that our day would come, it would, but that it would be our day and not the day of a Land that had clearly forgotten us.
And then my one in particular was taken.
And so was the rest of the Burden.
Leaving only me to seize the chance.
So what choice did I have but to run towards the rumour?
I did not sleep. I ran through forests and plains, up hills and down, across streams and rivers. I ran through settlements of the Clearing, burnt and abandoned, scars on the world left wherever the Clearing touched it. The sun rose and set and still I did not sleep, did not stop moving, even when my feet were covered in blisters and blood.
But I saw no one. No one from the Clearing, no one from the Land.
No one.
I began to think I was not just the last of the Burden but the last of the Land as well, that the Clearing had achieved their goal and had wiped the Land from the face of the world.
That I was alone.
And on the morning I thought this, a morning where I stood on a riverbank, where I looked around yet again and saw only myself, only 1017 with the permanent mark burning into his arm–
I wept.
I crumpled to the ground and I wept.
And that was when I was found.
They came out of the trees across the road. Four of them, then six, then ten. I heard their voices first but my own voice was only just beginning to come back, just beginning to tell me who I was again after the Clearing had taken it away. I thought it was myself calling to me. I thought it was my own self calling me to my death.
I would have willingly gone.
But then I saw them. They were taller than the Burden ever grew, broader, too, and they carried spears and I knew that here were warriors, here were soldiers who would help me take revenge on the Clearing, who would right all wrongs done to the Burden.
But then they sent greetings I found difficult to understand but that seemed to say their weapons were merely fishing spears and themselves simple fishers.
Fishers.
Not warriors at all. Not out hunting for the Clearing. Not coming for vengeance on the death of the Burden. They were fishers, come to the river because they had heard the Clearing had abandoned this stretch.
And then I told them who I was. I spoke to them in the language of the Burden.
There was great shock, an astonished recoil I could feel, but more than that, too–