Rampart Knife sorrowed as they told us this, for they knew they couldn’t make us see what they’d seen and they despaired of making us understand. You just got to believe it was terrible, they said. More terrible than what you’re thinking of now as you try to draw these things inside your minds. You can’t. You’ll never know it except by seeing it your own selves.
Scores of people, they said, followed behind this dreadful caravan; scores, or maybe hundreds. Jon saw women and men, young and old. There were even children there. “We thought at first they was prisoners, but they didn’t have no chains or ropes on them and they run to keep up if they was falling behind. They wasn’t a red tally, for there was few weapons among them apart from knives, and the knives was not in their hands but in their belts. The best we could guess was that they come from the same village as the great wagons and had come to cheer them on into the fight. For it was a fight they was gathered for. You couldn’t look at them and doubt that. Every one of them wagons was made to tear down or break apart or trample flat whatever come in front of them. But we still didn’t know who that might be, and we was hopeful it was Half-Ax. Maybe the Peacemaker had tried that trick of saying all tech was his own once too often, and the people of the west had decided to set him in his right place again.
“We almost went down to them. We was screwing up our courage to it. But then we seen the worst thing of all, and we turned straightway and run back out of there.
“Most of the wagons seemed to be driving their own selves, but the biggest one of all had riders in it. There was three of them. One was a girl we never seen before. One was Ursala-from-Elsewhere.”
Jon’s voice had gone hoarse and faint as he was speaking. It was not to be wondered at. He had run for four days straight, and besides that he had swallowed a great deal of that smoke they told us of. He said he could still taste it in his mouth. All of them could. He tailed off into silence now, like he had run out of breath or else that sour taste had got too much for him.
“The third was my brother,” Athen Woodsmith said. “My brother Koli.” She gave the name a hard edge, and she grimaced. Tears stood in her eyes, but they stayed there and didn’t fall.
“Koli Faceless is coming home,” Jon said into the dead, scared silence. “And seeing what he’s bringing with him, I don’t think he’s coming as a friend.”
Koli
61
After Arkom, we set out again eastwards. We picked a day of heavy overcast, though trees didn’t trouble us so much when we was riding in the crawler. Forests broke on us, like waves of the sea break on rocks.
The people of Arkom was sad to see us go. They gathered at their gates to see us off, and hugged and cheered us. Some of the children waved the wooden toys I’d made for them, and many of them that Ursala had healed brung her gifts of food and cloth and jewellery. She was not happy to get so much attention, but she took the gifts with as good grace as she could and even tried to smile. Cup come away with a gift too, which was a bow and a quiver of arrows. She said she was a great deal happier knowing she could give answer if we was attacked.
There was more cheering as the great engines started to growl and rumble, and then again as they got moving. Of course we moved so slow we was in sight of the gates for a long while after, but still there was a mood of Summer-dance. Even after the side of a hill finally hid us from sight, people kept coming by to wave at us again and to sniff the wet asphel. It was a smell people loved and hated at the same time. If you kept on breathing it in, you got dizzy as if you’d been drinking beer or cider.
We got back into our stride and kept up the same pace as before, a mile or most of a mile every day. It was a life we was getting used to, for all its strangeness; a life spent moving forward a little at a time and never stopping. Even at night, the wagons rolled on with only Monono staying awake to guide and watch over them. The rest of us slept in the glass house up on top of the crawler that Monono called a cab, although oftentimes Cup slept up on the roof where there was more room, trusting to Monono to watch over her and to warn her if anything hurtful should come.
It should have been a good time. The things we’d wished for were starting to happen, after a time when it seemed like we’d been fighting ever and again just to stay alive and in the world. News of our coming was still riding ahead of us, and we was welcomed in each village when we come to it. People had heard about the road now and they was longing to see it. They brung us food to eat and water to drink so we didn’t want for nothing at all.
But there’s always a few flies in the soup. Ever and again, when I was tired or when my thoughts wandered, Stannabanna come back into my mind like a rat creeping through a hole in the kitchen wall. I would remember something that had happened to me, and then I would realise of a sudden that it hadn’t happened to me at all, but to him. I never stood on the big platform in Trafalgar’s square and told the people of Ingland that they was meant to show the rest of the world how to live. I never loved a woman named Talisa, nor I never stood by when she was arrested for something called sedition and then when she was hanged on one of London’s many, many gather-grounds. I never made great piles of them strange things called books and set fire to them, so the voices of people that was already dead would die all over again.
But I smelled the stink and I felt the sickness of all them things as if they was a stink and a sickness that was soaked deep into me. I waked at night sometimes, whimpering in the dark with his fears and my own all tucked and tangled each in other until I almost forgot who I was.
I asked Monono if there was anything that could be done to fix this. I had only had the sensorium on my head for a few minutes. Couldn’t the things that had been put inside me in that time be took out again and throwed away somewhere?
“It’s not that easy, Koli,” Monono told me as gently as she could with the drone’s rasping voice. “Even if I had the right tools for the job, I wouldn’t want to mess with your little noodle more than it’s already been messed with.”
“I know you’d be careful though,” I said.
“Well, I’d do my best. But honestly? I only just got through doing this stuff with my own mind, and I almost upset the whole apple cart. I’m not in a hurry to go again. Listen, there used to be a game, back in Monono one-point-zero’s day, called Jenga. You made a tower out of little pieces of wood. Then you took turns to take away a piece from the middle of the tower and put it back on at the top. The trick was to do it without making the tower fall down. Only with each piece you moved it wobbled more and more. I’d be playing that game with your living brain, Koli-bou. If you’ve got your heart set on this then I’ll do it, but I wish you wouldn’t ask me.”
Well, after that I didn’t feel like I could make her do it. I just had got to put up with the strange rememberings, and with feeling like some of the time there was someone else standing behind my eyes and looking out of them. It was not a good feeling, but I guess I got used to it. When the Stannabanna thoughts come, I pushed them away again with thoughts of Mythen Rood. My home, where I had spent the biggest part of my life. Stannabanna had only ever stood on that ground once, after he burned and bombed and broke what was there before. Thinking on that difference was a good way of paring away his mind from my own.